Road Cyclist's Manual 2020 Edition

FROMM THE MAKERS OF

Cyclist l ’s li Road

Training Manual

2020 EDITION

HOW TO

BURN FAT FAST

283

Hacks to help you lose that gut

EXPERT TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR RIDING

GET RACE READY 12-week plan to nail any sportive

TR AINING

THE ULTIMATE WINTER-PROOF WORKOUTS

RECOVERY & REFUELLING

SECRETS

YOUR BEST YEAR EVER BEAT ANY HILL

GO FASTER FOR FREE

BANISH BAD HABITS

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2 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

WELCOME This annual edition of the Road Cyclist’s Training Manual is put together to give you the most effective and most up to date bike fitness, strength and endurance training advice available. If you’re serious about getting fitter, riding faster and going further with your bike, then we’ve got the expert knowledge that will enable you to do just that.

We’ve tailored the advice inside around what is most appropriate for each season, allowing you to train all year round and in all weathers.

Enjoying your training is the key to doing it well.

Get that right, and along with our coaching tips, you’ll be on your way to making 2020 your best riding year ever.

6 TRAINING CAMP Expert training, fitness and motivational advice in easy to digest nuggets

CONTENTS WINTER

THE GREAT INDOORS 20 Eight workouts designed specifically for your turbo trainer

MEET THE RESISTANCE 26 Weight and resistance training advice from Sir Chris Hoy

BURN FAT FAST 32 How to turn your bike into a blubber burning machine

RIDE SLOW GET FAST 38 How taking it easy can actually yield massively effective results

SPRING

SUMMER

AUTUMN

CHAMPION ADVICE

LEARNING FROM EVERYONE

HILL CLIMB HEAVEN

46 Riding tips from the UK’s most recent grand tour champions

84 Wisdom and advice from those who live and breathe cycling

110 Workouts that will drastically improve your climbing PBs

STUCK ON REPEAT

HARDER FASTER LONGER

SMASH THE TRAILS

52 How to banish your bad habits once and for all

90 How a proper pacing strategy can improve your efficiency

116 Why you should be swapping the Tarmac for the trails this autumn and winter

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

FOCUSED SKILLS

96 How to get faster without upping your training or buying fancy new kit

120 Improve your bike handling by learning this cyclo-cross skills

THE SCIENCE OF SUFFERING

STRETCHING THE LIMITS

102 Why embracing pain will make you faster

126 Learn to loosen up with these yoga poses for cyclists

FUELLING SECRETS 58 Ten ways to quickly and easily give your nutritional intake a boost

CLIMBER V DESCENDER 64 Does a good climber beat a fast descender? Plus, how to improve at both

SPORTIVE TRAINING 70 Sharpen yourself up for a sportive with our 12-week training plan

THE LONG GAME 76 How ultra-cyclists go the distance and how their techniques can help you

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 3

ADVICE HE ALTH NUTRITION

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 5

EXPERT ADVICE

MEET THE AUTHOR MARK BAILEY

How can I boost my motivation?

Pro tips to propel you towards the bike rather than the box-set Everybody loves cycling during the hot days and light evenings of summer but during the cold, dark months of winter it is tempting to skip training rides and hibernate indoors with a box-set instead. The solution starts with honesty: you’re not a robot or a paid professional cyclist so it is entirely normal for your motivation levels to fluctuate. But by learning a simple mind trick used by Team GB cyclists you will find it much easier to keep your training on track.

“Motivation is essentially an emotion that comes from a certain part of your brain and no matter how strongly you want to achieve your goals, that motivation will come and go,” explains triple Olympic team pursuit champion Ed Clancy, who competes on the road for Vitus Pro Cycling. “Some days it will be massively strong and you can’t wait to get outside. On other days maybe it’s cold but you have to do a six-hour ride and the last thing you want to do is hack around on tired legs. The secret is to focus on commitment instead.”

The distinction between motivation (a desire to do something) and commitment (a dedication to do something) is subtle, but rewiring your brain to focus on the latter is crucial.

“Motivation comes and goes but commitment is different: either you commit to a training programme or you

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN MOTIVATION AND COMMITMENT IS SUBTLE 6 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

don’t. It’s as simple as that. So on days when you can’t be arsed, accept that you’re not motivated today and think instead of your commitment. You might not enjoy training that day, but commit to it and in five hours’ time you will feel an amazing sense of satisfaction.”

The key to good commitment is good organisation: if you know what you are doing, when you are doing it and how it will make you fitter, stronger or faster, you will find it much easier to commit. “Having a session written down and knowing why it’s good for you will make all the difference,” explains Clancy.

“It’s when you think, ‘I haven’t got time’ or, ‘What’s the point?’ that you’ll start to lose interest.”

Ed Clancy races with Bradley Wiggins in the Team Pursuit finals at the 2016 Olympics

A sports writer and fourtime Haute Route finisher, Mark regularly interviews pro cyclists and experts to explore the latest health insights

IMAGE ROBERT SMITH

TRAINING CAMP

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 7

ROOKIE RIDERS We ask the questions that beginners are dealing with and get answers from the experts...

Do I really need to have a bike fit? not suit you, and you are asking for trouble.

Don’t just go for the first fitter that you find in your local area. You need to find someone with experience who can look at you as an individual, and not rely 100 per cent on some bike-fit technology to sell you unnecessary upgrades. Once you have had a bike fit don’t assume that that is it forever. You change as you become a more experienced rider, or become older, so naturally your position on the bike should change too.”

MATT BOTTRILL , NATIONAL TT CHAMPION AND COACH, MATTBOTTRILLPERFORMANCECOACHING.COM “The benefits of a professional bike fit are plentiful and include: better pedal efficiency through correct cleat alignment and saddle height, improved glute

activation and back comfort – with saddle set back and angle – and enhanced lower back and shoulder comfort, with stem length and bar height. All of these things will improve your efficiency on the bike and reduce the accompanying risk of injury.

Master fitters will also be able to improve your aerodynamics, which translates simply into ‘free speed’. Be it that you ride a road or a TT bike, the body produces approximately 80 per cent drag, so a better body position and the right biomechanical changes will relate to more speed. Other positive results of a good bike fit include the takeaways of specific drills, strength and conditioning exercises and stretching to improve mobility and flexibility. Your body and bike position is always worth re-evaluating so I would always recommend getting your setup checked each season, just to see if there are any key areas you can make improvements on.”

IMAGE RUSSELL BURTON

ROB WAKEFIELD LEVEL 3 COACH, PROPELLO.BIKE “Would you buy a £1000 plus suit without making sure it fits properly?

Getting a professional bike fit from an experienced fitter is one of the most important steps when buying a new bike, or making sure an existing bike is setup perfectly for you. A good bike fit will leave your bike set up in a way that will improve your overall comfort, prevent injuries, reduce riding fatigue and make you more efficient. If you suffer from pain, numbness or sores when riding, it is highly likely that a bike fit will improve irritations that are often avoidable. As a cyclist you will spend many hours riding your bike, sitting in a static position, repeating movements over and over again. A four-hour ride at 90rpm equals 21,600 turns of the pedals. Do this week in week out in a position that does

THE BODY PRODUCES APPROXIMATELY 80 PER CENT DRAG, SO A BETTER BODY POSITION WILL RELATE TO MORE SPEED

8 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

TRAINING CAMP

“IF SOMEONE COMES IN WITH A LEFT SIDED SADDLE SORE, AS A PHYSIO, YOU THINK, ‘IT’S AN ASYMMETRY ISSUE’”

MEET THE EXPERT PHIL BURT Burt spent 12 years as head of physio at British Cycling and five years as consultant physio at Team Ineos. philburtinnovation.co.uk

ROOKIE RIDERS

I keep getting saddle sores, but only ever on one side. Is there anything I can do?

Advice from the experts on preventing riding induced posterior pain Human beings are asymmetrical.

Bikes, are universally symmetrical… unless you’ve got them set up wrong!

Accommodating the asymmetrical rider to their symmetrical machine is a huge part of my job. I’m comfortable with asymmetry, and if it isn’t causing you an issue, I believe in not correcting it as you can cause more problems than you solve.

We all have ways of compensating for our asymmetry in our day-to-day lives, but when you transfer yourself to a bike, sometimes those strategies break down.

One of the biggest subjects that cyclists talk about is leg length. There are different approaches to cope with actual leg length differences – where bones, such as your femur or tibia are longer in one leg than the other – and, what in my experience, is more typical: functional leg length difference. This has more to do with the pelvis, lumber spine and the hips.

Twists in the pelvis occur for a variety of reasons: exposure to one-sided continual

loading, injury or to accommodate our heads and eyes being level. The pelvis irons out our kinks and bends in the spine to achieve this. The consequence is that one leg may be functionally shorter or longer.

When you transfer that to a bike, for some people that functional leg length difference means that one side of the body is sitting further back, or further down, than the other – and that can cause some issues. If someone comes in with a left-sided saddle sore, as a physio and bike fitter you’re already thinking, ‘It’s an asymmetry issue.’ As a physio you would examine them and might discover that they have a back issue on the right-hand side, which has resulted in a twisted pelvis. When sitting on the bike, the only way they can sit is off to the left because the right leg is functionally shorter.

There are different ways this can present, but a common one is that if, for example, the right leg is shorter then they

will have to set-up for this leg. The longer leg, in my experience, is not the natural driver for optimal saddle height. This can be seen with the right leg tracking straight up and down, whilst the functionally longer left leg appears to move in and out at the knee a lot more because it has to (the saddle height is effectively too low on the left, so the leg has to move laterally to get through the pedal stroke).Hard correction of this can work by building up the shorter leg under the cleat and raising the saddle height for the longer leg, therefore optimising saddle height for both.

Actual leg bone length differences are rarer and the success of intervening with hard correction is knowing where the difference in bone length lies – thigh or shin? Shin requires cleat build up, whereas with thigh, cleat fore/aft has to be considered.

Sometimes asymmetry can be driven by position. A small functional leg length difference can be amplified in its relevance if the saddle height, tilt and set back are all wrong. Sitting too far back, too low and with the nose of the saddle up forces the pelvis to rotate back, robbing the body of some of its compensation for dealing with the asymmetry and making the distance to the pedal further. The individual has no choice but to sit asymmetrically. Hard correction of this situation is papering over the cracks and non-essential – optimising the position to an effective one to pedal in comfortably and efficiently often sees asymmetry drop away.

If you recognise that you’re struggling to reach the pedals, make it easier to reach them. If you reduce crank length, top dead centre decreases and bottom dead cent decreases, so you haven’t got as far to go down or come up and that’s easier on a system that’s already under strain.

These are just rules of thumb, which may help some but not all – you can never beat a one-on-one assessment to deal with individual issues.

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 9

LIKE A PRO...

Foul weather riding If the clouds roll in, it’s no excuse to head to the turbo, says Liam Holohan “Coaching is far more than the prescription of intervals,” explains Liam. “As a coach I have to look at all of the elements that go into a potential race result. This for me was highlighted recently thanks to a number of downpours during race events. It can be all too easy to opt for, ‘I’ll just do an hour on the turbo’, however, facing the elements and the challenges that come with cycling through the rain are part of the game.” While some adaptations can be made to the bike and accessories to help pros deal with wet conditions, changing one’s approach to training rides can mean you can get more out of even the rainiest of days. Here are a few tips Holohan uses with clients when the weather turns foul…

01 TYRE CHANGE One of the challenges when riding in the rain is an increased risk of puncturing because all that debris at the side of the road has now been washed into the path of your tyre. You can limit your risk by putting on some fresh tyres for your big event. They’re not cheap, but I bet you’d gladly pay £80 should you puncture out of the move you worked so hard for.

02 TRAIN IN RAIN It pays to train to the demands of your chosen event and, since rain is one of the unpredictable factors, you should take every opportunity to train in it to get to know how the bike handles differently in the wet conditions and what tyre

10 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

pressure to run. Don’t use your goal race to figure this out. Lowering your tyre pressure will put more tyre on the road, increasing your grip to the surface.

03 BOOK COVER Keep a training diary and make a note of what you wear on rainy training days and how it performs. Extra layers will increase

TRAIN IN RAIN... GET TO KNOW HOW THE BIKE HANDLES DIFFERENTLY IN WET CONDITIONS

the moisture you produce – raising the risk of chafing. A hard shell will keep you drier but make you sweat more; a soft shell isn’t so waterproof but is more aero, which the pros prefer. Record your choices in your log and refer to them the next time it’s wet.

04 RAIN DROPS Wet weather conditions can influence your choice of training course. It’s often preferable to ride flat roads in the wet – where breaking is easier, especially as you need to break earlier. You have more control than you would on wet descents and when you get cold you can ride harder to warm up, which you can’t do on downhill stretches.

TRAINING CAMP

NUTRITION Advice on plant-based nutrition from wellseasoned vegan riders

Ex-pro rider for UCI teams Team Wiggins, Rapha Condor and Madison Genesis now coaching in Shrewsbury at Holohan Coaching.

05 WATER LEVELS When it’s cold and wet many riders feel that they don’t need to drink, which then puts them at risk of dehydration.

You’ll almost certainly still be sweating and losing moisture through respiration.

Another area that riders struggle with is eating as it’s harder to get into your pockets and un-wrap things – experiment in training with drinks, gels, rice cakes, little sandwiches.

You’ll use more energy to stay warm so it’s critical that you fuel well.

I want to go vegan. will it affect my performance?

JONATHAN CARNALL FOUNDER ‘EAT PLANTS NOT PIGS’ CYCLING CLUB “Based on my experiences as a vegan cyclist and those of vegan pro rider Adam Hansen (first rider in history to complete 20 consecutive Grand Tours), I’d recommend sticking to a wholefoods plant-based diet as closely as possible. This will keep you aligned with the ethics of veganism but will also make sure that your nutrition is optimal in both the long and short term. If you switch to a wholefoods plant-based diet, make sure to include plenty of fresh fruit and veg along with beans, legumes, nuts and seeds, while limiting processed foods as much as possible.

If you do this then I would expect you to notice some significant improvements in energy levels, which will lead to greater capacity to train hard and recover quickly. It’s worth noting that B12 and iron deficiencies (often cited as a major concern for vegans) are also a problem for non-vegans, with many people having sub-optimal levels, despite eating animal products. After doing some further research with regards to B12 it turns out that in many cases, farm animals are now being supplemented with B12/cobalt because modern farming practices and the sterile and segregated environments that we all now live in do not give us access to the B12 producing bacteria

that we would have once had. There are plenty of vegan athletes groups on social media and a hugely informative website at nutritionfacts.org.”

SAMANTHA TAYLOR BRITISH TRIATHLETE AND BRAND AMBASSADOR AT BETTERYOU LTD “In my experience it will affect your performance – but in a positive way.

The main benefit I found from changing to a plant-based diet is that my recovery rate and overall energy levels greatly improved. Vegan food doesn’t always necessarily mean healthy - it’s whole, real plant-based food that is good for you - so when changing to eating plants it’s important to get a variety, think lots of colour.

This ensures that you get all the highquality nutrients you need, which is what I believe led to the improvements in my recovery rate. It’s also important to make sure you eat enough, this is vital if you have a high-intensity training schedule. A plate of salad, vegetables and rice can contain a lot less calories than meat and two veg. I like eating, so I love that I can have three meals a day as well as snacks, such as fruit and nuts, and continue to feel healthy and full of energy, while on a vegan diet. Vegan food also tends to be easy to digest, so the body focuses on using energy to cycle.”

IMAGES GETTY

MEET THE COACH LIAM HOLOHAN

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 11

EXPERT ADVICE

How can I push through the pain barrier?

Don’t let the voice in your head stop you from reaching your full potential All cyclists have to endure pain but if you build a mental toolbox of pain-busting techniques, you can learn to push through the suffering and emerge a fitter, tougher rider. Six-time Olympic track cycling champion Sir Chris Hoy insists the secret is to reframe your mental response to pain.

“There were days when we were doing interval sessions and you knew it would hurt like hell,” reveals Hoy. “But I told myself that this session would push my threshold and bring me real improvements. Our brains are good at inhibiting anything that they think is damaging. It is a survival instinct. But you can teach your brain to ignore those signals and say, ‘Okay, I am not doing damage, this is just part of the exercise process and I can keep going.’”

In his book How To Ride a Bike: From Starting Out To Peak Performance , Hoy reveals that when the pain kicked in he would access positive mental imagery.

“If you think of your fitness as a table tennis ball and your training as some water, the lower you push the ball underwater, the higher the ball bounces back,” he explains. Rewiring your response to pain in this way – so you think of it as the natural by-product of increasing your strength and fitness –

OUR BRAINS ARE GOOD AT INHIBITING ANYTHING THAT THEY THINK IS DAMAGING. IT’S INSTINCT 12 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

can help you to fight off the instinctive negativity that floods your mind when your legs start to hurt.

Hoy also recommends using visualisation techniques. “If I was doing 30-second efforts in the gym I used to visualise riding around the track, so I would hear the bell, go around the turn, finish down the back straight, then cross the line – basically, using the inspiration of a race to help me suffer through the pain.” Positive thinking is crucial if you’re going to fight through the suffering. “The more you practise these strategies, the more easily you can apply them. The pain never goes away – but you can learn to deal with it.”

Learn how to go from being a good cyclist to a great cyclist with Olympian, Chris Hoy

IMAGE GETTY

TRAINING CAMP

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 13

LIKE A PRO...

MEET THE COACH LIAM HOLOHAN

Make race weight

Ex-pro rider for UCI teams Team Wiggins, Rapha Condor and Madison Genesis now coaching in Shrewsbury at Holohan Coaching.

The power to weight equation is everything, says Liam Holohan “When the gradient pitches up, power to weight is king,” explains Liam Holohan. “We’re going to look at the second part of this equation. The vast amount of the mass isn’t the bike, but you, so this should be the first port of call when looking to improve power to weight.”

According to Holohan the aim among elite cyclists isn’t to just drop weight, but to improve body composition. “That means reducing fat mass, while preserving muscle mass – this is best done in the base period of training, rather than in the few weeks before (the build period).” This is because during that build period riders are looking at increasing power, for which it’s critical to fuel. “Burning the candle at both ends rarely works and can lead to limited adaptation. The key to healthy weight loss is to create a small energy deficit each day.”

01 WEIGHTING GAME Crash dieting and major calorie restriction is certainly not the way to go.

It’s not healthy, sustainable and will lead to a drop in power.

02 PICK PROTEIN Focus on unprocessed foods, which are rich in nutrients. When not exercising, try to eat lower GI (Glycaemic Index) foods and raise your protein intake.

Protein-rich foods are high on the satiety scale, which means that you’ll feel fuller for longer. Aim to get protein at regular intervals throughout the day.

03 STRIP SEARCH If you’ve hit race weight, then you can also look at stripping out excess from your bike and components. If you’re on

14 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

IMAGES GETTY

Dylan Van Baarle: the Dutch time trial champion has perfected the ‘low-res’ diet

a budget, look at rotational weight first.

By this I mean things like wheels, pedals and shoes; rather than helmet, frame...

04 SPORTIVE SPECIFIC Look at a hill-climb bike – everything is stripped back, even to the removing of the bar tape. If you’re riding a six-hour sportive, I wouldn’t recommend you go that far. Otherwise, just enough food and water to get to the first feed stop. I often see riders with bulging pockets and several litres in bottles. This can easily add 2.5kg to your total mass.

05 GO LOW A ‘low-res’ diet in the days leading

up to the event – meaning low residue – requires you to drastically reduce your fibre intake. It isn’t a sustainable practice and even pro riders will only do it leading into a critical mountain stage, before resuming a balanced diet.

A great example of someone who can pull all this together is Dylan Van Baarle – not an obvious choice, but look at how he can transform himself from the spring to the summer. He’s a genuine classics contender in the early part of the season, before pulling turns in the high mountains in the Tour, putting riders like Adam Yates and Romain Bardet out of the back.

TRAINING CAMP

We ask the questions that beginners are dealing with and get answers from the experts...

How should I best prepare for a multi-day event?

DAN GUILLEMETTE , SPECIALIST CYCLING PERFORMANCE PHYSIOTHERAPIST AT CHHP AND FOR TEAM MITCHELTON-SCOTT Physically, you must know the demands of the event: how many days is it? What and when are the longest stages? How long are they and the estimated amount of climbing? What will the weather be like?

This should influence your training plan but a basic approach to training for a multi-day would be to aim for two to three rides during the week of one to two hours at a higher intensity; also plan longer rides at the weekend and ride on consecutive days to adapt.

Remember, the biggest barrier to not completing an event is under-fuelling, so practise eating and drinking at regular intervals during your rides to maximise your optimal fuelling and hydration strategies. Try a variety of products so that

you find an energy gel, bar or drink that suits you best. Getting this right off the bike is vital to aid recovery between stages. Also get adequate sleep as this is probably the most important factor to stimulate the recovery process and, where possible, implement a simple stretching routine to complement your training.

Finally, when you’ve done all you can to ensure you’re physically up to the job, make sure your bike is in full working order and you have appropriate gearing. Check your clothing is sufficient, you have comfortable shorts and good chamois cream to limit saddle sores. Also ensure you have a correct bike setup to reduce injury risk and ensure comfort.

THE BIGGEST BARRIER TO NOT COMPLETING AN EVENT IS UNDER FUELLING

DR RUTH ANDERSON, SPORT PSYCHOLOGIST, AUTHOR OF THE CYCLING MIND (BLOOMSBURY) Prepare to compete in a multi-day event by considering ways to optimise your mindset and you will perform at your best.

That means competing with a plan. The greatest challenge in a multi-day event is to stay in charge of your thinking. It is important to keep your focus on one day at a time, and only the process of what you need to do to ride. If you think too far ahead, anxiety, self-doubt, or fatigue will take over your mind.

Create a simple plan for each stage that details the key elements of the event. A race plan will keep you focused, prevent you from anticipating fatigue and maximise your ability to execute your skills.

Prepare for psychological recovery too.

Recovery for your mind is as critical as your body to sustain your performance standards. Debrief at the end of the day to review your performance, and then switch off your mind.

Physical relaxation exercises, such as progressive muscle relaxation, assist to reduce the cumulative tension experienced when you are under stress, and prepare you for a good night’s sleep. Psychological recovery will enable you to maintain intensity, cope with fatigue, sleep well, and be ready to ride in your optimal mindset every day.

IMAGE LAURENT SALINO, HAUTE ROUTE, ALPE D’HUEZ

ROOKIE RIDERS

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 15

EXPERT ADVICE

How can I sleep better before my next sportive?

Success in a multi-stage event, such as Julian Alaphilippe’s at the Tour de France, requires excellent overnight recovery

How to prevent jittery nerves the night before affecting your performance After months of dedicated training, there is nothing worse than a night of broken sleep before your big sportive.

Anxiety, everyday stress or a poor sleep set up in your bedroom can leave you struggling to drift off so you wake up feeling exhausted. “Bad sleep can affect performance, energy, mental focus and concentration, whereas quality sleep can bring more consistent performances, faster recovery times, higher motivation levels and better decision making,” explains sleep coach Nick Littlehales (sportsleepcoach. com). “But the first time many athletes think about it is when their head hits the pillow.”

Littlehales, who has helped elite athletes such as footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and cyclist Bradley Wiggins to improve their sleep quality, stresses the importance of developing a relaxing pre-sleep routine to calm your mind – not just the night before a

Sir Bradley Wiggins benefitted from sleep coaching from sleep expert Nick Littlehales

16 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

race, but every night: “You need to make your pre-bed routine exactly that – a routine – so your body learns all the signals that it’s time to switch off.” Put away your phone or tablet a few hours before bed, move from bright ceiling lights to softer yellow lamp light and remove electronics with red standby lights from your bedroom.

“During the first hour of sleep all that light is like a laser into your pineal gland so you don’t create the right balance between sleep hormones and wake hormones and you spend most of the night in a light sleep state.”

Reading a book, taking a warm bath or using a meditation app will also help condition your mind for sleep. And, contrary to misconceptions, one of the most natural triggers for sleep is a cooler bedroom and a cooler bed. Littlehales recommends setting a bedroom temperature of 16-18C and using a lightweight microfibre duvet, rather than a heavy one stuffed with natural filling, because they adapt better to temperature fluctuations to help you maintain a steady body temperature during the night.

Armed with your own tailor-made presleep routine, you’ll feel refreshed and race-ready by the time you tuck into your morning porridge.

QUALITY SLEEP CAN BRING MORE CONSISTENT PERFORMANCES AND FASTER RECOVERY TIMES

TRAINING CAMP EXPERT ADVICE While cycling is undoubtedly good for you, riders need to take extra care of their bone health

How can I protect and strengthen my bones?

MEET THE EXPERT MARK BAILEY A sports writer and fourtime Haute Route finisher, Mark regularly interviews pro cyclists and experts to explore the latest health insights

Cycling will keep you lean and boost your heart health but, no matter how much you enjoy riding a bike, it is important to accept that it will not strengthen your bones. A major review published in BMC Medicine confirmed that adult road cyclists tend to have low bone mineral density in areas such as the lumbar spine and hip. That’s because cycling is not weight-bearing, so your bones don’t endure the forces encountered in other sports like running or tennis, which help to stimulate bone growth. And cyclists also tend to take more time off their feet to recover in between training rides, which only exacerbates the problem. With weaker bones, you’re more at risk of conditions like osteoporosis and stress fractures.

The good news is that it is easy to fortify your bones with a few simple strength exercises each week.

Research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research confirmed that adding in some basic weight-training exercises improves the lumbar spine and hip bone density of competitive cyclists.

“To improve your bone health, strength exercises need to be done with weights in order to load the muscles sufficiently to create torque on the bone and result in osteogenic (bone-building) stimuli,” explains Nichola Roberts (velophysio.co.uk), who specialises in physiotherapy for cyclists.

To strengthen the bones in your hips and back, she recommends doing squats, deadlifts and Bulgarian split squats. “Start with a low weight, work on form, then gradually

increase the weight. Twice a week is ideal, but for time-crunched cyclists once a week is sufficient. To have gains in bone health these exercises need to be performed regularly year round.”

She also suggests doing plyometric exercises like box jumps, lateral jumps and jump lunges, and a few gentle weight-bearing jogs.

Consuming calcium-rich food like milk, green leafy vegetables, nuts and sardines can also strengthen your bones. “Nutrition plays a large part in bone health, and calcium and vitamin D are important,” explains Roberts. “But also depriving your body of energy is detrimental to bone development.

In endurance cycling this can be a tricky balance, particularly with regards to your power-to-weight ratio. But just making sure you are fuelled sufficiently before and during rides will help prevent disruption in bone health.”

CYCLING IS NOT WEIGHT BEARING, SO YOUR BONES DON’T ENDURE THE FORCES ENCOUNTERED IN RUNNING ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 17

CHAPTER 1

WINTER Ok, it may not be the most appealing time of year for getting out on your bike, but winter is the ideal time to work on your base fitness, all-round conditioning and strength.

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IMAGE ANDREW MCCANDLISH ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 19

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WINTER

THE GREAT INDOORS Whether injury, climate or time pressure force you to switch your riding to a static trainer, there is nothing to stop you building a rounded performance plan…

WORDS PAUL ROBSON

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INDOOR TRAINING

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Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

So said Doc Brown to Marty McFly at the end of Back to the Future in 1985, before whisking him through time to, er, last year. Even a few months later, only the most committed of eco-activists would deny that we do, actually, still need roads. But could the wild-haired inventor of time travel have been right after all, at least in one respect? Do we really need roads to get better at cycling?

“I wouldn’t be as daft as to say only train on your Wattbike,” says the static trainer company’s founder and chief sports scientist Eddie Fletcher, “but people do, and you can go a long, long way by doing so. And if you can’t get out on the road if you’re time-poor or injured then you can build a whole training programme around it and come out fighting.”

With that in mind, we looked at the some of key elements to a rounded training plan and asked the question: can I work on that indoors?

1 2 3 ENDURANCE

“You can absolutely build your endurance working indoors,” says Fletcher. “Our winter plans in particular are designed around building that base endurance that you need to then go on and do big intervals. Working indoors allows you to control your endurance workouts just as you would your intervals, to ensure that you are doing what you should do rather than what you shouldn’t.

“And you really don’t need to go out for five hours to build that base endurance on a static trainer because it is all work, from the moment you step on the bike.

“The maximum that any of my riders would do on a Wattbike – and this is the absolute maximum – would be 90 minutes.

And even then I split that session up because it can be soul-destroying just sitting on a static trainer for 90 minutes, although people do. I’ve seen people on the internet talking about sitting on the turbo for a long, long time, but they don’t need to. Ninety minutes on the static trainer is probably worth at least three hours on the road, so you’re getting the ‘miles’ in and it’s very controlled, so you’re getting a heck of a physiological workout from it.”

INSIDE INFO Spend 90 minutes riding in Zone 2 (see In The Zone, opposite), and move around within your zone to help combat boredom.

Or break the time into 20-minute blocks at the top of zone 2/into zone 3 with five easy minutes recovery between blocks.

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STRENGTH

Although opinions vary on the need for weight training for cyclists, incorporating some strength work into your on-bike sessions can help you produce more power and train more muscles to disperse lactic acid.

“Strength work needs to target strength fibres in your leg muscles at a very high resistance,” explains Nick Thomas of The Endurance Coach, “so cadence during these intervals will be low. Strength sessions on the turbo will typically involve very short efforts working 100 per cent at maximum resistance with long recovery periods. Gear selection will need to be high during the efforts, and you should remain seated throughout.”

INSIDE INFO Try a set of 15 10-second all-out efforts at maximum resistance with 1min 50sec recovery periods spinning an easy gear.

Always warm up and cool down.

CADENCE

“Building a better cadence requires the control of an indoor trainer,” claims Fletcher.

“Once you’ve built it indoors you can go out and practise it, in terms of matching gearing and cadence to terrain and conditions, but while building that leg speed it is something you can practise very precisely indoors.

“I do believe, after hundreds of tests, that there is a need to build cadence. I have done tests with riders with too low a cadence and they weren’t able to get to the result that they were physiologically capable of purely because their cadence was too low, so they were pushing too high a gear, and the body just can’t do it.

“So you are limiting yourself if you get the wrong gear selection and cadence selection.

Yes, people have different abilities, if you like, but you are holding yourself back if you try to push too big a gear at too low a cadence all the time. Lightening the gear means there is less force per pedal stroke, but the increase in pedal revolutions gives greater power with a lower physiological effort.

“And training your cadence on the static trainer does translate to the road – I have no problem in getting my athletes to then replicate a higher cadence/lower gear approach on the road.”

INSIDE INFO 3 x 3min @ 90, 100, 110rpm – watch for hip wobble, think smooth; take one minute of easy spinning between sets.

INDOOR TRAINING

IN THE ZONE British Cycling training zones explained ACTIVE RECOVERY What it feels like: Very easy, just turning the legs over and there should be no sense of burning or fatigue.

ENDURANCE What it feels like: Steady all day pace, you would still be able to maintain a full conversation, but it is purposeful.

TEMPO What it feels like: Determined and purposeful, there is a definite sense of effort, and fatigue will gradually build up.

THRESHOLD What it feels like: Hovering near to your limit but just sustainable.

Theoretically this zone should be sustainable for 60 minutes but novices will definitely need to build up to this.

VO2 MAX What it feels like: Pushing very hard, requiring high levels of effort and a high level of focus. Your legs will start burning very quickly at this intensity.

ANAEROBIC CAPACITY What it feels like: This is a 100% sprint involving maximal effort.

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4 VIRTUAL PLEASURES Is the virtual reality world of Zwift bringing the outdoors in?

Indoor training is many things, but it is not sociable. However, the arrival of Zwift (www.zwift.com), a virtual reality cycling training game that lets you ride with your mates without leaving home, has changed all that.

Zwift isn’t the first VR game of its kind in cycling but, just like Strava wasn’t the first app you could upload ride data to, it’s packaged up in a slick, accessible way that may just take it to the masses.

You can go for a casual ride, or make it competitive and race for jerseys, and it’s this ‘gamification’ element that certainly crosses over with the Strava crowd.

You need a subscription (free for seven days, then £12.99 a month).

You also need a good laptop, a turbo trainer, an ANT+ cadence/speed sensor, an ANT+ dongle, internet connection and a TV (the bigger the better). For the best experience, Zwift advises a smart turbo that records power, such as the Wahoo Kickr or Tacx Neo Smart.

It includes real-world courses such as that of the World Championships in Richmond, Virginia in 2015 and Innsbruck in 2018. Other real venues include London and New York – albeit with the latter being 100 years in the future.

For 60-year-old New Yorker Jeffrey Ritter, finding Zwift has been a shot in the arm for morale as he recovers from a serious injury picked up while training for the Race Across America. Doctors told him to stay off the road for at least a year and he missed cycling, from a fitness and social perspective.

“I can’t call Zwift a life-saver, the doctors and my wife did that, but I’m no longer alone and depressed in my basement, I’m sitting with friends in this virtual world. For cyclists it’s social media on steroids.”

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CLIMBING

Can an indoor training plan really prepare you for those moments when the road points upwards? Some coaches would suggest upping the resistance again, to recreate the force of gravity, but Wattbike’s Fletcher suggests that training cadence will again prove beneficial here. “While you do have to prepare for the hills in the hills to some extent, climbing is something I think you can train for indoors,” stresses Fletcher, “using leg speed and low gears: watch Chris Froome go up Mont Ventoux at 103rpm on a 35x28: physiologically it works well and you can train it. You can’t replicate terrain indoors, but you can replicate the effort and leg speed needed. And it will translate to the bike, despite what purists will tell you.”

Fletcher-coached athlete Mark Fenn (see The Insider, p103) adds: “Is there a limit to replicating climbs indoors? No, if anything its easier. Where I live there are no long climbs, but setting cadence and power on the Wattbike to simulate climbs is easy.”

INSIDE INFO Try 3 x 15min blocks, with five minutes of recovery in between, riding at a high intensity that replicates your effort level on a climb. Try to achieve this with a high cadence, rather than pushing a big gear.

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“If you are in the category of a racer who is going to be up there vying for position then you will have to be able to react to people putting the hammer down, and you will need to do some very specific work for that. It’s no less or more important than endurance or anything else, it’s just another part of the plan.”

INSIDE INFO

TOP END SPEED

“Top-end speed comes from base endurance, but a lot of people neglect that, so you get people doing a lot of high-end intervals and ‘threshold’-type work, but all they’re doing is the same thing over and over again,” explains Fletcher.

“Improvement comes from punching up that huge engine that you need, and then just topping it up as the icing on the cake.

“So the bulk of the work that my endurance riders do is building that base endurance and what I call sustained power – the ability to sustain their power for a long period of time. If you’re aiming for a 100-mile sportive, what you need to be able to do is sustain that power for four or five hours, or however long it takes, and that’s not really about doing highend intervals.”

Top up your top end by introducing all-out efforts into an endurance session: two blocks of five minutes sprinting flat out for 10 seconds then 50 seconds of recovery, with a recovery period in between the two blocks.

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THRESHOLD

“The thing about ‘threshold’ and so-called threshold testing is it comes out with statements like ‘based on that result you should be able to do x for an hour’,” says Fletcher. “Not true. The maths involved in these equations is based on perfection, and perfection doesn’t exist. Not even in a highly trained athlete.

“So if you did a type of threshold test that suggested you could do a given power for an

INDOOR TRAINING

as well, but I’m not using the test as the gospel because that’s perfection and it’s never going to be achieved. So it’s about interpretation, and managing the athlete.

“And that’s the beauty of indoor training, you can precisely control all of those elements.”

INSIDE INFO A 2 x 20 session: 2 x 20 minutes at level 4 with 5 minutes easy spinning in between.

7 hour and you tried it you’d probably die in the attempt. You might do half-an-hour, or 35 minutes, but getting up to an hour might not be possible unless you had that exceptional physiological ability and you had successfully built up that base endurance or sustained power.

“So I have a golden rule that if the athlete busts the heart rate for a zone then they must reduce the power – keep the cadence, change gears and keep the heart rate in check for that particular zone. In the end that will push everything else up

RECOVERY

“The priority of any training plan is to improve fitness while keeping the athlete as injury- and illness-free as possible,” explains Endurance Coach’s Thomas, “and that requires rest. Improvement comes from training overload plus adequate recovery. It is essential that you commence your training sessions recovered, ready and able to hit the required intensities.”

Although a day of total rest should be scheduled into your week, the turbo is an excellent way to work easy recovery rides into your schedule, again because of the consistency of environment they provide.

Even if you set out for an easy ride on the road, a headwind or a hill can soon push you outside your recovery zone.

INSIDE INFO A 20- to 30-minute spin in an easy gear on a rest day keeping in zone 1.

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OKAY, GO OUTDOORS

“I tend to say that during the winter, if you can get out once a week to get used to the weather, terrain, riding in a group with your mates, then that’s what I’d like you to do,” says Fletcher.

“Then as you go into spring and summer you should do more road work, because riding in a group, using the right gears, managing terrain, going downhill and getting used to the weather – you will need to work on these.

“But even in summer I’d still recommend half your sessions should be done inside, whatever the weather, because then you’re still getting those controlled sessions. And if you are time-pressed, then these sessions are perfect for the evenings.”

Fletcher’s athlete Mark Fenn recommends exercising even more caution when it comes to venturing outside.

“You can’t do both. Time-efficient training is hard, so when you do have time to go out and enjoy a long ride you often should just do a short ride or not ride at all, as recovery is very important.

“There is the argument that riding indoors doesn’t teach you bike skills and I completely agree but how many accidents happen due to riders being tired?

Therefore improving fitness can help prevent this.

Of course bike handling, cornering and the like, are all valuable and need to be learnt and this is where making use of any rides outside would come in.”

THE INSIDER Time-pressed Mark Fenn trains exclusively indoors on his Wattbike, and has reaped some impressive results…

“I work as a personal trainer,” explains Mark, “and I do long hours so I’m very aware of the battles people face with wanting to improve their fitness with limited time. I’ve always had the approach that it’s not about the hours spent training but what you do within them.

“Do I believe you can just train indoors? Yes, I do, and even if I’m doing endurancebased training in zone 2 it would be no more than a 90-minute session. You have to

be of a certain mindset to train exclusively indoors, but isn’t wanting to be a better cyclist enough?

“I’ve taken so much stick, but the days of working 9-5 and five-hour rides on a Sunday are long gone. In 2015 I was third best all-rounder in the Shropshire Cycling Clubs Association time trial series, and I did that on three hours per week. There are no easy sessions but they are progressive and specific to me, so they are achievable.

“Sometimes in my three hours I failed to complete the planned session because I just couldn’t produce the correct power, so I learnt to stop and cool down.

This stopped me overtraining and, in time, I started completing the sets.

“This training is not for everyone, but for anyone who is injured or time-restricted the Wattbike becomes a valuable tool; using basic personal data keeps you training to the correct intensity and helps monitor progress and fatigue.”

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MEET THE RESISTANCE

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If you’re looking to get stronger this winter, and you should be if you want to be a faster cyclist next year, who better to guide you than Olympic superhero Sir Chris Hoy? The sprint king shares his top resistance training exercises…

WORDS SIR CHRIS HOY IMAGES BRYN LENNON

here are only so many hours in a day, and you want to ride your bike, so why do resistance training? Well, firstly there are ways of doing resistance training on your bike (see panel) but lifting weights is the most effective way to get something every cyclist needs, and that’s a bit more torque and power. There are other benefits to be gained from training with weights too, such as improved physical balance and, if done sensibly, protection against injury.

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WHAT IS TORQUE? Torque is force applied in a rotational direction. An extra bit of grunt, as it’s often called, can really improve overall performance. Having the ability to produce a lot of torque can help you stay seated on climbs while others are expending more energy out of the saddle. It helps you accelerate quickly with less effort to create a gap, and also helps you win sprints – and winning sprints helps you win races.

Some cyclists avoid lifting weights because they think it builds bigger muscles, and increases body weight. However, it takes a huge amount of high-resistance training, with a high protein diet, to significantly change your body shape. A session or two of moderate load and intensity per week is all the average rider

needs to get extra torque without gaining mass. It can also be a welcome break from the bad weather and monotony of dark winter road miles during the off-season.

LIFE AFTER 40 The over 40s should especially consider incorporating strength training into their programme all year to maintain bone health and slow the drop off in performance due to decreased production of two key hormones - testosterone and human growth hormone.

Cycling is fantastic exercise for anyone of any age, but one of the things that makes it so good – the fact your bike carries your weight – is its biggest drawback too. As bones are living tissue, their cells are continuously regenerated throughout your life, but cells are replaced in response to load, so if you don’t load your bones, your body won’t create new live cells at the rate the old ones die and you could end up suffering from osteoporosis.

Luckily short bursts of hard training, like heavy lifting or sprint workouts, increase the production of these two vital hormones, even in older people. This is why older cyclists should spend a bigger proportion of their training time doing these kinds of workouts, and cutting back on longer rides.

ON THE BIKE RESISTANCE TRAINING Long before we went to our first Olympic Games I used to do a really extreme version of this with my fellow Team GB sprinter Craig MacLean. On the bike resistance training can be achieved by increasing gear ratios, riding up steep gradients or adding extra weight to yourself or your bike. Of course, you could do all of these together, which Craig did. At one time his training bike weighed 40kg. He filled the frame tubes with lead shot and put weightlifting plates in the bike’s pannier bags.

Going back a few years most cyclists trained on heavier bikes than they raced on, but it was the Italian road race world champion and three-time Paris–Roubaix winner, Francesco Moser, who brought high-geared low-rev training to everyone’s attention. The idea came from the Italian coach he worked with, Aldo Sassi, when preparing for his successful attempt on the Hour Record in 1984. The session involved repeated rides up the same long climb in a huge gear, which Moser could only pedal at 50-60rpm. Craig and I did that too, only with bells on.

We were sprinters so the hill didn’t need to be as long as Moser’s, and we only did runs of about 10 pedal revolutions to mimic the gym, but in a specific on-bike way. We pulled on our brakes to provide the most resistance possible without actually stopping and falling over, which we still did occasionally!

If the aim is to improve torque production and strength then it has to be a maximal effort lasting only a few seconds, maybe 10-30 seconds at a time, otherwise the output drops down to a level where it’s not eliciting maximum fibre recruitment. Short and explosive efforts are key, despite the fact that the resulting speed of crank rotation is very low. It’s the same principle as pushing heavy weights as explosively as possible in the gym.

The resulting speed may be slow but the intention is always to try to move it as quickly as possible.

You can get on-bike resistance training by finding the steepest hill in your area and riding up and down it a few times during a ride. You can make the hill even harder, and the training more effective, by going up in a higher gear than you would normally use. Try riding in and out of the saddle too.

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“NEVER SACRIFICE CORRECT FORM FOR MORE WEIGHT, BECAUSE DOING SO WON’T MAKE YOU STRONGER” SIR CHRIS HOY

CORRECT FORM I cannot stress enough that it is crucial to do all exercises with correct form. This is not only true for safety reasons, but because they are most effective when done correctly. Never sacrifice correct form for more weight, because doing so won’t make you stronger but will drastically increase your risk of injury.

I recommend you get qualified one-to-one instruction on how to do each of the strength and conditioning exercises here.

Finally, always wear the flattest shoes you can when weight training.

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RESISTANCE TRAINING SQUAT This is the king of exercises, if you do one lifting exercise and nothing else, do this one.

It builds leg, core and back strength in a very functional way.

Start with the loaded barbell supported on a squat rack or stand, with the bar at collarbone height. Face the bar and step underneath it.

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Hold the bar low down on your shoulders with your hands as close together as your flexibility allows. This bunches up your shoulder muscles so that the bar has a natural shelf of muscle on which to rest.

2

Tighten your gluteal muscles together, engage your transverse abdominis by drawing your navel back towards the spine, and take the weight of the bar on your shoulders before stepping back. Stand straight with your feet slightly wider than your hips and toes pointing outwards.

3

Squat down lowering the weight slowly, looking ahead and keeping your spine neutral.

Don’t let your spine go rounded, but don’t try to hyper-extend it the other way either. Your knees should track your toes.

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Lower until your thighs are parallel to the floor. If you can go lower, all the better, but this is something you should work on to progress with this exercise.

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TOP TIP As you progress the exercise, aim to get lower to the floor

Come out of the squat, back to standing, with as much power as you can put into the lift.

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DEADLIFT This is a functional movement that strengthens the kinetic chain used in cycling, as well as other sports. If performed correctly it also provides greater resilience to injury. It’s important to use an Olympic barbell loaded with one large plate rather than lots of smaller weight plates. Large plates raise the bar to the correct height on the floor to start the exercise.

Start with the barbell on the floor. Stand facing it with your feet hip-width apart and toes pointing slightly outwards.

With your legs straight, bend over and grip the bar with your thumbs behind it. Lower your hips, keeping your arms straight and spine neutral, until your shoulders are in front of the bar.

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Engage all your posterior chain muscles and your core, and drive upwards through your heels.

2

You should be able to wriggle your toes all through the lift, until the barbell is at hip height.

Keep your arms straight and don’t arch your back.

3

Return the barbell to the floor in a smooth and controlled manner.

4

TOP TIP Use one large weight, rather than a number of smaller ones

ROMANIAN DEADLIFT This targets the lower back, gluteal and hamstring muscles. Large plates aren’t as important for this one because you’re starting from a standing position. You don’t lower the weight as far as a regular deadlift, but it’s a much safer exercise in respect of lower back injury risk.

It really helps develop hip extension strength, which is very important in cycling.

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The barbell should be on a rack at hip height. Lift it off the rack with a double overhand grip.

Stand upright with your feet hip-width apart and toes straight, or pointed outwards by no more than 15 degrees.

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Keeping your arms straight, lower your torso until the barbell is just below your knees.

Move your hips back slightly and bend your legs as you do. Keep your chest and shoulders back.

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Once the bar is at knee level, activate your gluteal muscles by clenching your buttocks and return to standing upright. You should be using your hips to lift and activating your glutes and hamstrings. You shouldn’t be feeling this exercise in your arms, they should be straight.

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RESISTANCE TRAINING CALF RAISE This exercise improves ankle strength, which is especially important during accelerations or low-cadence/ high-torque pedalling, like when climbing steep hills. You can use both legs, or alternate between legs to create a greater load. Don’t expect to notice a drastic change in muscle size, regardless of how many of these you do. It is notoriously difficult to gain muscle mass in the calf area.

Stand on the edge of a step or low aerobics platform. Pull in your abdominal muscles and shift backwards until you are standing with the ball of your foot on the step.

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Lower your heel over the edge then raise your heel a few inches above the step.

Continue until you feel a pull in your calf muscles.

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3

TOP TIP Maintaining balance will help strengthen your core

Repeat the exercise on the other side.

DUMBELL LUNGE

Start by standing upright with a dumbbell in each hand, looking straight ahead.

This is a unilateral exercise, which makes it more specific to cycling.

It’s important to perform it in an explosive manner, pushing off the ground dynamically to get the most from it.

Step forward with either leg, leaving the other foot stationary behind you. The step should be far enough forwards so that when you lower your body, keeping your torso as upright as possible, your lead shin is at 90 degrees to the floor. Breathe in as you go down.

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Stand up by pushing through your lead heel and bring your rear foot forwards to the start position.

3

Repeat the move with your other leg for one whole repetition.

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Be as explosive as you can when you stand. Try to keep your balance, so you don’t wobble at all, because doing that helps strengthen your core. If you find you can’t keep your torso upright during this lift, that could indicate tight hip flexors or a weak lower back. More stretching and foam roller work will help improve the former, and the Romanian deadlift helps strengthen your lower back.

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WORDS ROB KEMP IMAGES STEVE BEHR , SEB ROGERS , GET T Y

BURN FAT FAST Converting body fat to energy can benefit endurance cyclists in a multitude of ways – but it’s a skill that requires a combination of training tactics and nutritional know-how...

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BURN FAT

or cyclists, mastering the use of body fat as a fuel is something of a busman’s holiday. That’s because one of the key routes to increasing the muscle’s capacity to store fat (in the form of triglycerides) and use it for energy is to ride… and keep on riding.

“Training on your bike in a variety of formats and fine-tuning your nutrition can make you more efficient at using fat as fuel at high intensity to preserve glycogen stores,” explains Nigel Mitchell, Head of Nutrition with Cannondale Pro Cycling.

However, to do that properly, he says, you first need to have a clear understanding of some of the concepts involved. To lose weight, you have to create a ‘negative energy balance’ in your body; in other words, expend more calories than you consume. The idea of enhancing

fat burning (to ‘burn fat fast’) simply means to increase the proportion of your expended calories that will come from stored body fat.

“Nutritionally you need to bear in mind that although you can ‘burn’ all three types of food calories (fat, carbohydrate and protein) to produce energy, the bulk of what you use to fuel a ride is derived from carbohydrate and fat,” says Mitchell.

Protein does contribute to ‘fat burning’ in that it can be used to ‘fool’ the body into thinking it has carbs to call upon during certain types of training. As we’ll see, it can help encourage the use of fat as fuel.

It’s equally key to avoid overdosing on high-glycaemic index (high-GI) foods that cause blood sugar levels to spike: “If there’s too much glycogen for the muscles or liver it can lead to the blood being flooded with insulin, which prevents the use of fat for energy.”

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Doing fasted training sessions two to three times per week can improve your ability to use fat and will enhance the effects of endurance training, as it trains the metabolism so it burns fat more readily.”

Carbs don’t just fuel the body; they nourish the mind too. Riding in a fasted state for a relatively short period of time – less than 90 minutes – may help to target your fat stores but that’s no good if you’re unable to keep your wits about you on busy roads. “Fasted training isn’t for everyone,” warns Kennedy. “I find I’m too focused on being hungry for it to work for me.”

Also, riding with the carb tank on empty means your levels of nitrogen and amino acids are depleted – which can make post-ride recovery a struggle. To counter this, nutritionists suggest keeping the intensity of fasted training sessions at a comfortable level – in a low heart-rate zone – and even taking a protein drink while riding, which won’t interfere with fat adaptation but will make boost recovery.

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FASTING BURNS FAT FASTEST ‘Fasted training’ is a wellestablished method of converting fat reserves into fuel.

The easiest way of doing it is simply by cycling first thing in the morning after a night spent sleeping – effectively ‘fasting’.

“After a long duration without carbs, your blood sugar will be low and the glycogen stored in the liver will have been depleted,” explains Charlotte Kennedy, Sports Nutrition Consultant for Etixx.

“Once you start cycling, fat becomes the main fuel source.

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IN THE ZONE… Zone 1 An estimated 4 out of 10 rate of perceived exertion (RPE), or 60 to 65 per cent of your maximum heart rate (MHR).

2 G OING ZONAL

Elite endurance athletes learn how to control the rate at which they’re tapping into fat fuel stores and are able to stave off the depletion of muscle and liver glycogen by exercising in ‘zones’ that can encourage fat conversion. And the theory behind it can be applied to cyclists at any level.

“If your goal is to maximise your body’s ability to burn fat as a fuel, then zone 2 is the one to focus on,” explains Hunter Allen, coach with peakscoachinggroup.com. “But you shouldn’t ignore the other zones completely.”

Researchers at Birmingham University’s Human Performance Laboratory came to the same conclusion, pinpointing a ‘Fat Max’ zone maximum heart rate (MHR) between 68 and 79 per cent where fat metabolism

was maximised in a study of 18 male endurance cyclists. Additional studies show that at around 69 per cent MHR, fat can provide half of the calories you need to keep going for the first hour or so.

Beyond an hour, fat becomes more plentiful as an energy source, providing around 70 per cent of the total energy after two hours and 80 per cent or more if your work duration exceeds three hours.

“But to burn fat so that you extend your endurance range, you need to teach your body to use fat first in every session,” says Allen, who combines fasting with zonal work in his coaching of pro riders.

“So start off every ride early in a fasted state and cycle for up to two hours at zone 2 and 3 to force fat to burn. Then at the end of two hours start eating some carbs and protein and then finish your ride with intensity and interval sessions.”

Zone 2 A more challenging 65 to 75 per cent MHR, or 5 to 6 out of 10 on the RPE scale. This is the optimal fat-burning zone over longer rides, according to many experts.

Zone 3 Around 7 out of 10, or 75 to 82 per cent of MHR – the target zone for developing aerobic capacity.

Zone 4 A lungbusting 9 out 10 perceived exertion, or for those of you donning a monitor that’s 82-89 per cent of your MHR.

E AT FAT S T O B U R N FAT E I G H T FAT B U S T I N G F O O D S Y O U S H O U L D B E E AT I N G Go nuts

Water ways

Open with oatmeal

Have avocados

Think pink

Get fruity

“Monounsaturated fats in nuts raise the basal metabolic rate and encourage body fat reduction,” says Kennedy. “Walnuts are a particularly rich source of omega-3s and alpha-linolenic acid that boost metabolism.”

Studies by the German Institute of Human Nutrition are among those that found drinking cold water increased metabolic rate in adults by up to 30 per cent for 60 minutes after consumption.

This very slowdigesting carb keeps blood sugar and insulin levels low, so fat burning can stay high.

Athletes who eat slow-digesting carbs in the morning are shown to burn more fat throughout the day.

Avocados are high in monounsaturated fats, and also contain a sugar called mannoheptulose, which has been shown to control insulin release and enhance calcium absorption, which encourages fat loss.

Salmon is one of the richest sources of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, which means it’s basically a straight supply of the kind of fats that your body finds easiest to burn and is less likely to store.

US study subjects eating half a grapefruit or drinking 8oz of grapefruit juice three times a day showed improved weight loss results thanks to grapefruit’s ability to reduce insulin levels and prevent fat storage.

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BURN FAT

3 T RAIN LONG Because fat is a slowburning fuel that requires oxygen to convert it into usable energy, it naturally lends itself to fuelling longdistance rides. So why do some exercise experts specifically rule out long rides as a useful contribution to fat burning? It’s simply because long rides also increase appetite afterwards, where high-intensity intervals suppress it. “You may have done the hours and burned the fat but you’re more likely to eat more at the end of the ride,” suggests Kennedy.

One option is to use carbs sparingly, as Allen suggests, after you’ve tapped into the fat. “If you were to just delay the intake of your in-saddle

“IF YOU WERE TO JUST DELAY THE INTAKE OF YOUR IN-SADDLE SNACKS, YOU COULD ENCOURAGE FAT ADAPTATION”

Peanut butter

Chilli peppers

Peanut butter is another rich source of monounsaturated fats – but aim for products containing natural peanut butters, with trans fats added.

The main benefit is that natural peanut butters contain no added salt.

The capsaicin in chillies has been found to boost calorific burn when you’re resting, as well as reducing hunger.

snacks, you could encourage fat adaptation that helps convert fat stores to tank fuel,” Kennedy says.

But converting fat to fuel takes longer than carbs, and requires lots of oxygen, plus cycling is rarely about the long, steady ride. It leaves you with a dilemma: if you increase the intensity then the fat contribution to fuelling your muscles decreases, but if you want to go really fast you need the faster-burning carbohydrate (glycogen) for energy.

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 35

WINTER

5 R AISE YOUR RESTING METABOLIC RATE

4 GETTING INTENSE Fortunately, with a bit of strategic planning it’s possible to mix ‘fast’ and ‘fat-burning’.

While steady cycling in the low-intensity zones can chip away at fat levels, research also highlights how getting the right combination of intensity and duration through interval training sessions can actually be more effective in helping cyclists turn fat into four-star.

“Interval sessions have a greater calorie cost than steady rides, especially when

36 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

a ‘fired’ up metabolism and suppressed hunger can be a factored in,” says Kennedy.

In one well-documented trial at the Laval University in Quebec, Canada, a group of 17 riders trained on an indoor bike four to five times a week for 20 weeks in steady workouts of between 30 to 45 minutes long, with exercise intensity ranging from 60 to 85 per cent of their maximum heart rate.

A second group of 10 riders completed 30-minute workouts at an intensity comparable to the first group, but this second batch conducted a mix of 19 short (10 to 15 intervals of 15 to 30 seconds each) and 16 long (four to five intervals of 60 to 90 seconds) sessions over a 15-week study.

While the first group expended twice as much energy during training as the second group – they burned more calories, in other words – the second group (who performed less work in total) recorded a nine-timesgreater loss of body fat. It was also found that going full-pelt for some sessions can trigger a more lasting ‘burn’.

Another way to burn fat faster is to increase your resting metabolic rate – the level at which your body naturally burns fat when not exercising. For many endurance athletes, achieving this is a result of combining aerobic training with resistance work and clever food choices.

You don’t need to go to extremes to feel the benefit, though. On the aerobic side of things, riding in those upper MHR zones will see you burn more carbs than fat, but you’ll still get through plenty of fat and the metabolic spike will continue long after you’ve left the saddle. In one study, this ‘afterburn effect’ – also known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) – led to riders who’d cycled for 45 minutes at high intensity levels burning an additional 190 calories in the hours after exercise compared to days when they didn’t cycle.

BURN FAT

FAT B U S T E R S P E D A L P O W E R E D FAT L O S S

BEFORE AFTER

6 MAKE FATBURNING MUSCLE Replacing body fat with lean muscle will keep the embers alight, too.

“Just two 30-minute sessions of resistance training within your weekly aerobic exercise programme can significantly improve your metabolic rate,” explains Nick Grantham, Olympic coach and author of The Strength & Conditioning Bible.

Muscle mass is metabolically far more ‘active’ than adipose (fat) tissue,

so increasing your muscle mass means that the rate at which you burn up energy – even while resting – is raised too. For cyclists, Grantham suggests total body programmes including resistance exercises to engage all the muscles vital to road-handling and power-generation – from the glutes to core, and beyond.

“The ideal session comprises 10 to 12 exercises designed to work all the major muscle groups,” says Grantham. “Aim for one to two sets of 10 to 15 reps per exercise, with enough weight set so that the repetitions can only just be completed.

This will produce good results if you’re not an experienced resistance trainer.”

The overall effects of these fat-burning training methods will impact on your body fat percentage, but only so long as you watch your intake too.

“INCREASING YOUR MUSCLE MASS MEANS THAT THE RATE AT WHICH YOU BURN UP ENERGY IS RAISED TOO”

Steve Konrad, 42, Ashby, Lowestoft

Rob Lee, 28, Tooting, London

“I have dropped from 32 per cent body fat to 18 per cent today. This reduction isn’t the outcome of a fad or yo-yo approach. I was a 100kg rugby player but injuries resulted in seven knee operations, leaving me with screws in both legs.

I took up cycling at 36, switched to a diet plan and now race Open 10/25 time trials, criteriums and the odd road race. I still weigh 85kg, but I generate 348W FTP and have a personal best of 21 minutes for 10 miles.

“I try hard to maintain a balanced diet that has 40% carbs, 30% fats and 30% protein, but I have a cheat meal every week.

Breakfast: “I have a breakfast shake with almond milk, a protein drink mix, a few frozen cherries, flax seeds and a pint of water with Thermo Tea.” Mid-morning: “An apple or pear, cottage cheese and cashews or almonds with a pint of water mixed with Oat Apple Fibre” Lunch: “3-egg omelette with salmon, cream cheese and onions, a pint of water and a Thermo Tea and supplements.”

Mid-afternoon: “Hot water, protein drink mix, Whole Earth peanut butter and a teaspoon of coconut oil – blitz and it tastes like Horlicks!”

Dinner: Bulgar wheat, vegetables, a salmon fillet, plus supplements.

“When I started cycling I was around 70kg, with body fat at around 13 to 14 per cent. Now I’m 63kg, with 7 per cent body fat – although I did measure it at 5 per cent at the height of my training.

At that point I was training for the Dragon Ride and was cycling four to five times a week, with a longer 70- to 120-mile ride on the weekend. I wasn’t specifically trying to lose weight and reduce my body fat percentage – it just happened with the amount of exercise I was doing!

“The longer rides would be at a steadier pace with no intervals.

However I’d also work on my strength and speed during the week by including a couple of speed/sprint training sessions of about an hour long. These would include maximum output bursts of 30 to 45 seconds, with a recovery time of around two minutes in between.

“My diet played a huge part. I wasn’t drinking alcohol at all, went mostly glutenfree – eating a lot of sweet potatoes! – and my diet was generally high in protein and vegetables. I also all but completely gave up eating anything containing refined sugar. I felt very fit; there was a lot of sacrifice involved, but I felt great for it.”

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 37

WINTER

RID E

SLOWER FASTER GET

If you think that smashing every ride is the only road to cycling success, it might be time to start taking your foot off the gas occasionally so you can reap the rewards when it really matters WORDS PAUL ROBSON

There really is no substitute for creating a strong fitness base on which to build top end performance.

“Zone 1 rides – below 60 per cent of your threshold power or 80 per cent of your threshold heart rate [see Jargon Buster, over the page for more] – are an essential component of any training plan,” explains Nick Thomas of The Endurance Coach.

“To improve fat burning efficiency and base endurance. The more aerobically efficient you are the further and faster you’ll ride with the same effort. However, many people complete these rides too hard leading to unnecessary depletion and fatigue, which compromises the sessions that will develop speed.

“To ensure you’re able to reach – and maintain – the required intensities during interval sessions you should

38 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

limit all endurance-building sessions to Zone 1 regardless of how slow you’re moving. I recommend cyclists leave their bike computer at home so they can’t measure speed or distance during these sessions, as the information is completely irrelevant. Save the effort for when it’s needed.

“For many people polarised training is very effective, especially during the winter months – in other words, training is either very easy or very hard. Every session has a specific aim so maximum adaptations are achieved.

Zone 1 sessions can range from short commutes to longer weekend rides but the principles remain the same for every session.”

In practice: Learn to keep your effort constant – don’t get sucked into commuter racing.

Steve Behr

1

BASE HEAVY

IMAG E STE VE B EH R

SLOW FAST

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 39

WINTER

2 “Winter is a great chance to add strength work into your training program to enhance climbing, sprinting and accelerating out of corners,” advises Stuart Gourley of Radeon Cycling.

“Sessions can be conducted on the road or turbo. Include a warmup before starting the strength intervals, so aim for at least 15 minutes, working up to Zone 3, then add in 5 min intervals.

Start with intervals at a cadence of 75rpm, then five minutes of recovery in Zone 1 at 95rpm+, repeat this four times, then do a cool down back to a relative resting state.

“After completing this session a few times try reducing the rpm in the strength interval, go to 70 for a week and then 65. Mix it up by using a onelegged drill approach and turn a bigger gear for 5 reps in each leg, focusing on keeping the pedal stroke efficient and building strength in both legs equally.

Keep an eye on your joints, if they start to hurt change to an easier gear.”

In practice: Riding in Zone 3 at 75rpm and less will require pushing a high gear, so speed is irrelevant.

IMAG E STE VE B EH R

JOIN THE RESISTANCE

3

JARGON BUSTER TRAINING INTENSITIES: A SIMPLE GUIDE Both coaches mention training in ‘zones’ and these will be based on heart rate or power. We talk a lot about Zone 1 training here, and by this we typically mean below 60 per cent of

threshold power or 80 per cent of threshold heartrate – ‘threshold’ is the level of effort you can maintain for an hour – and often much less. If you can’t work out your threshold HR, go as hard as you can to get an idea of your max HR, and do Zone 1 rides below 70 per cent of this.

40 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

FIGHT THE FAT

During my own training for Paris-Brest-Paris 2015 I regularly rode my 16-mile morning commute without breakfast, eating once I’d arrived at work. This was on the advice of The Endurance Coach’s Nick Thomas, who was in charge of my training and helped to ensure I completed my mammoth ride through northern France. The idea was to train my body to use my abundant fat reserves as fuel, something it was initially bad at.

“Advice is contradictory,” admits Thomas, “but we find that the most effective way to improve fat burning ability is to complete low intensity Zone 1 sessions first thing in the morning without calories. The theory is that the body is forced to access fat stores for fuel as there is less carbohydrate readily accessible.

“The length of the session depends on experience but most people should be able to complete a 60-minute session if they are adequately hydrated.

“There is growing evidence that a diet with more fat is beneficial for endurance athletes in terms of their general health and performance. We generally advocate a diet that is low in simple carbohydrates and higher in protein, fat, vegetables and low GI carbohydrates.

“During longer rides calories would be consumed at some point but this is dependent on the length of the ride, rider experience and weather conditions – nobody should get cold and depleted as the immune system will then get stressed and training can be compromised for several days afterwards.”

In practice: If you ride to work, try waiting until you get there before having your breakfast. Be sure to ride easy though.

SLOW FAST

4

RECOVER YOURSELF As we will discuss below, you will only get the most out of your hard and fast sessions if you begin them in a rested and recovered state.

To do that, you will need to learn the importance of taking things easy.

“Recovery rides are well known to be a good way to help prepare for a tough session,” expands Stuart Gourley.

“It is believed that these low intensity sessions, ideally Zone 1, help to remove all the bad by-products of training and riding hard. Active recovery is recommended ahead of complete rest sometimes.

“Typical recovery rides should be easy in intensity and less than an hour long.

I recommend that riders keep up a higher than normal cadence to help spin the legs out, somewhere towards 100rpm is ideal.”

In practice: Go for an easy spin of less than an hour the day after doing a really hard training session.

5 IMAG E RUSSEL BU RTON

OFF YER BIKE! You can’t slow down any more than sitting on the sofa at home in front of the TV while your bike stays unridden in the garage. But even slowing to the point of stopping can help you get faster.

“Rest days are just as important as days on the bike,” stresses Radeon’s Stuart Gourley.

“Your body only gets stronger in the process of recovery. When you’re training you are progressively overloading your body and your muscles. When you are resting these muscles your body is recovering, repairing itself and gradually adapting to the increased training load and making you a stronger rider in the process.

“Rest days are also a really good opportunity to do some core training at low intensity levels to work on some of the other muscles that are needed during riding but that sometimes get overlooked in a regular training plan. Having a strong core will help with maximising the power transfer from your body to the bike, which will help you when you are climbing, accelerating and sprinting.”

In practice: If you want to train at your best, always try to take at least two rest days a week. And don’t be afraid to take more if you feel your body needs it.

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 41

WINTER

6 “Using leg speed is really important,” explains Gourley. “We’ve looked at lower cadence and strength training, but now we need to look at converting that to speed. High cadence drills are a good way of building this.

“Try turning a steady gear where you’ll comfortably hold 90ish rpm.

After a warm-up, spin up to 120rpm and hold this for as long as you can without bouncing in the saddle.

Recover for five minutes and try again – this time aim for 130rpm. Keep trying until you find a cadence where you bounce inthe saddle.”

You might find that you need to use a fairly easy gear to achieve these leg speeds, which means you won’t initially be travelling any faster and may well be below the ‘optimum’ speed you could manage at a lower cadence in a harder gear over the same terrain. Don’t sweat it! You might be going slower now, but it will enable you to go faster in events when it matters.

“You are training the muscles to work (in other words, to switch on and off) at higher cadences than you’ll race at,” says Nick Thomas. “This enables you to work more effectively with better technique at your optimum cadence.”

“Leg speed helps your body adapt to the changes in pace and speed that come with racing bikes,” adds Gourley, “and will help you become more efficient. Riding on the velodrome is great to help develop leg speed and strength as well.”

In practice: If you have a velodrome near you look into doing a track session once a week through the winter. It’s a great opportunity to add another dynamic to your winter training.

42 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

IMAG E ADAM GASSON

FAST LEGS, SLOW PACE

7

MAKE TIME FOR TECHNIQUE

“Base rides provide you with a great opportunity to go back to just enjoying your riding, as well as practising techniques and pedalling efficiency,” says Radeon’s Gourley.

Good techniques to work on while the pressure to go fast is off include cornering and descending. Take downhill corners slowly, focusing on simple skills such as ensuring your inside pedal is up, your weight is being pushed through the outside pedal, that you brake ahead of the

bend and that you are looking where you want the bike to go, not where you don’t. Increase the pace gradually as your confidence in your technique increases.

As for enjoying yourself, well, leaving the computer at home is a good start, and Gourley has some suggestions of his own. “Perhaps try a new route,” he says, “or stop for that coffee and cake you might not normally stop for when doing a tough interval session.”

In practice: Find a group and ride together, but ensure you’re all happy with knocking back the pace.

SLOW FAST

IMAG E STE VE B EH R

8

GET A PLAN “Fail to plan, plan to fail; the same is very much true for training,” stresses Gourley. “Targeted training is really important to ensure that you get the most out of your training time. The end of the season is a great opportunity to reflect on what has gone well and not so well with your season and your training, but it’s also a must to then set yourself some objectives for the upcoming season. Make the objectives SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely).

“A good place to start is understanding the demands of the event you will be taking part in, this will then help you plan and understand what training you need to do and what specific techniques and elements of fitness you need to work on most. Also understanding your own strengths and weaknesses is very important.

“Once you’ve worked out your objectives, the event demands, your

strengths and weaknesses, and when you can train and for how long, you can start to plan what you need to do and where to spend the most time.” And that won’t always be at high intensity.

“Think of training intensities as a pyramid,” says Nick Thomas, “with easy Zone 1 at the bottom and very hard Zone 5 at the top. Each layer is equally important.”

So, while training at Zone 1 won’t in itself lead to improvements at Zone 4 or 5 intensity, trying to work at those intensities without having trained in Zone 1 will create a much less stable overall structure.

“We usually find when people come to us that they are doing their easy sessions too hard and their hard sessions too easy.

“You have to be specific and have a goal for every session, and sometimes that will mean backing off a bit,” concludes Thomas.

In practice: Every session is a specific means to an end, so ensure stick to your training plan – even if you get overtaken!

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 43

IMAGE RUSSELL BURTON 44 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

CHAPTER 2

SPRING After building that solid base over the winter, now’s the time to step it up and focus on making real gains. Plan in the events you’ll enter this year and start targeted training to be at your best.

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 45

SPRING

CHAMPIO WORDS SAM DANSIE IMAGES GET T Y

46 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

CHAMPION ADVICE

ADVICE We asked some of the UK’s most recent grand tour winners Geraint Thomas, Chris Froome and Simon Yates for their tips for racing, training and life

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 47

SPRING

“Being able to block off time for whatever session you’ve planned is hugely important.

Maybe it’s waking up an hour earlier to go on the turbo trainer before going to work, but if you make the time to do something, you’ll get there” Chris Froome

JOIN A GROUP “You need to find a good group to go out with. If it’s raining and you know you’re meeting at 10am and we’re going to this coffee shop, a group really helps to get out the door. The hardest part about cycling isn’t the actual riding but getting out the door. Once you’re out, it’s fine.”

Simon Yates Few things are more demotivating than opening the curtains on a miserable day that promises damp gear, sketchy roads and a

48 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

muddy bike, but committing to join a group at a specific time is an incredibly powerful motivator. The banter helps take the edge off the weather.

“It depends how motivated you are, but if you know you are going to be finding it difficult at times, then joining a group is a brilliant way to get going,” says Julia Shaw, a multiple national time trial champion, and now a coach.

She also points out joining a club or group has another benefit as it’s a good source of information and experience. “Most clubs have a range of ages and genders… by just going along you get to learn a lot,” she says.

DISCOVER WHAT YOU’RE GOOD AT “Going through the British Cycling Academy, we just raced and it happened naturally that we found what we’re good at. You race for a traffic light, you sprint up a climb, and you get to know where you excel.” Simon Yates

CHAMPION ADVICE

Newsflash: we enjoy something more if we’re good at it. Hardly the most earthshattering insight, but with so many styles of riding around – road-racing, gravel, criteriums, hill climbs, sportives, timetrialling and track-riding to name a few – knowing where you’ll excel and what you’ll enjoy is probably going to be a stab in the dark to begin with.

Shaw’s advice is to have a go at as many different events as you can. “Go and try a few races, or if you’re new to racing, a sportive. It’s a start, and then you can progress to trying road racing.” Even if you’re a beginner there can be an entry point into a new world. “If it’s on a closed circuit, a Cat 4 race, women’s only race, or a club 10, it’s all good. Club 10s are fantastic, there are a lot of them and they are accessible.”

WORK TOWARDS A GOAL “Pick a goal that motivates you and is not something somebody’s just said, ‘Why don’t you go for this or that’. If you commit to something and really want to do it, you go out and do what’s necessary.

And if you understand why you’re doing something, you can commit to it more.”

Geraint Thomas

On those days when training’s a struggle having a fixed target will give you that extra boost to step out of the front door.

“When we get new riders in, the first thing we do is try to find a nice target or goal that’s exciting to them,” Julia Shaw explains. “It should also be realistic but a bit of a challenge. A nice compromise between those three so it’s achievable. The key to improving is doing something you enjoy and enjoying the actual process of going from where you are now to where you need to be to achieve the target,” Shaw says.

“By going onto the track you can replicate interval training. On the track you’ve got the heart rate a lot higher than the zone 3 that you tend to find most club runs and average training rides will fall into” James Roberts, coach

GET ON THE TRACK “If you can get to a track it really helps. All that time on the track riding team pursuit certainly helped me stay in position in a time trial. It also really helps your skills of riding in the bunch, and leg speed. Another big one is that it helps you deal with stress – there was nothing more pressurised than a World’s final or the Olympics in London.”

Geraint Thomas

James Roberts explains that riding on a velodrome can also help you maintain a good level of fitness, particularly in winter.

“A good solid winter base on the track will give you your top-end speed for spring and summer,” he says. “By going onto the track you can replicate interval training... you’ve got the heart rate a lot higher than the zone 3 that you find most club runs and average training rides fall into.”

EVEN IF YOU’RE HECTIC, BLOCK OFF TIME FOR TRAINING “Being able to block off time for whatever session you’ve planned is hugely important.

Maybe it’s waking up an hour earlier to go on the turbo trainer before going to work, but if you make the time to do something, you’ll get there.” Chris Froome

ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 49

SPRING

As the saying goes, ‘If you fail to plan, plan to fail’ and, according to James McCallum, founder and head coach at What’s Your META, organisation is crucial to freeing up time to get on the bike or hit the gym regularly. “It’s not usually the training that’s the difficult part, it’s the organisation of everyday life that you’ve got to work with,” he says. Try simple things like doing

“Understand that all functional threshold power is, is a baseline number for you to work on different intensities... and understand that different intensities relate to the various energy systems your body needs to get better at working at in competition” James McCallum, coach

food preparation ahead of time, laying your kit out the night before, making sure your bike is ready and checking what the weather’s doing, and having a plan B if it’s raining cats and dogs. It all helps claw back and maximise quality training time. “Chris has to ride seven or eight hours a day sometimes. Most amateur riders are on the bike one maybe two hours a day, but it’s amazing what you can achieve in that time.”

LEARN TO USE A POWER METER “I identified using a power meter would really help when I was in my teens. When I started training properly, I started to learn a lot about power training and numbers.

Naturally, it takes time to know what the numbers mean and what you’re seeing.”

Chris Froome Do you know the difference between your FTP and your IF and how the latter differs from your TSS? Or do you see those acronyms and think, WTF? “You can deep dive into these things and suddenly it feels like you’re looking at the stock exchange,” says McCallum. Almost all

his clients train to power. He advises them to keep things simple. “Understand that all functional threshold power is, is a baseline number for you to work on different intensities... and understand that different intensities relate to the various energy systems your body needs to get better at working at in competition.”

He says he hears a lot of riders say they need to improve their FTP, but certain events like hill climbs, criteriums or circuit racing bear little relation to the FTP number. If you’re starting out using a power meter, “Speak to a coach to really break it down,” he advises, “Or, worst case scenario, read Hunter Allen’s book, Training and Racing with a Power Meter.”

WORK ON YOUR WEAKNESSES “For me, it’s about being consistent with my weight. Understanding my body more and knowing what I need to eat and my ideal weight. That all comes from trial and error.

Another one was climbing, which is obviously to do with weight but also being able to put out that power for a sustained amount of time.”

Geraint Thomas

For McCallum mitigating a rider’s weaknesses can be done in several ways.

For a start, pick events that play to your strengths. Not a climber? Target the Tour of Cambridgeshire, not the Fred Whitton Challenge. And if there is a piece of road coming up that’s going to expose a weakness, deploy some race craft.

“If you’re in a race or training situation where it’s hilly, and you know you’re not great at hills, put things in place, like go to the front to give yourself some sliding room.

That works both ways, so if you’re not good on the flat, you have to learn to hide. Knowing what you’re good at is just as important because then you can start planning.”

And, finally, McCallum, a crit specialist, suggests some old-fashioned stoicism goes a long way. “I used to get sent to hilly road races and I was like, ‘Here we go!’ I just knuckled down and suffered through it.”

GET TO KNOW YOUR BODY “Make sure you understand your own body and when you feel good and bad. If you don’t know how you feel and you’re just looking at a number it’s probably not great.

Your coach can’t tell you during a race that you feel good – just go off feel.” Simon Yates Don’t be a slave to the numbers, agrees McCallum. “You have to listen to your body. Ninety per cent of pros don’t race to power unless they’re in a break or

50 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

specifically targeting a stage.”

McCallum also points out riders often think they are one type of rider when they may actually be another. “Most people don’t know what their strengths and weaknesses are, but give them a little bit of training on something they’re not comfortable with and they go, ‘Actually, I’m quite good at that.’ Maybe it’s just because they haven’t done that on the bike or in the gym.

“You’ve also got to have an honest conversation with yourself. ‘I might like the way a certain race looks on television, but am I really that kind of rider? Have I got that kind of muscle make-up?’”

In the long run, it pays to really know who you are.

VISUALISE THE PERFECT PERFORMANCE, NOT THE END RESULT “I’ve never really visualised the end product, like standing on the podium; it’s more just visualising the perfect ride. Every turn, every corner. Same with the Tour. I visualised being in the race and getting that little extra out of things. The first time I thought about being on the podium was when I actually was.” Geraint Thomas

“You have to listen to your body. Ninety per cent of pros don’t race to power unless they’re in a break or specifically targeting a stage” James McCallum

Former pro and co-founder of international training consultancy Dig Deep Coaching, Stephen Gallagher, says visualisation becomes second nature to elite athletes.

Further down cycling’s hierarchy, visualisation is not automatic but just as beneficial. “Take time to look at the road on a map. Just looking at Google Maps or a video of the descent will help. And whenever you’re on your bike going down your local climb, use visualisation to build your confidence, so if you do it right on your local climb, you can say, ‘I did it right there, I can do it right here in the event as well.’”

FUEL FOR THE SESSION YOU’RE DOING “When I was younger I used to race on the track and I would get 20 chicken nuggets after every training session. As a young guy, eat whatever you want. Make sure you feel good, make sure you enjoy it.

Maybe when you get older and you want to improve, you’ve really just got to fuel for the session. If you’re doing a lot of high-intensity stuff, you need a lot of carbs. If you’re just riding easy, rather more fats and proteins.” Simon Yates There is no one-size-fits-all eating and drinking strategy for different riders doing different rides at different intensities.

“Know yourself, know your fuelling and know what the food is going to do for you,” says James Roberts. “And experiment.

Don’t leave it until the day of the event to then start eating some gels. There are very few toilets on a sportive!”

The consequences of not getting your fuelling right are straightforward. Eat too much of the wrong thing and your body won’t enjoy it, or don’t eat enough and you’re going to struggle to keep riding.

EAT AND DRINK ACCORDING TO CONDITIONS “Knowing what conditions are like and tailoring a fuelling and hydration strategy that works for you is important. I’m still tweaking mine and it changes so much depending on what conditions I’m riding in.”

Chris Froome

When Froome won the 2018 Giro with an 80km attack on stage 19, it was hot. His nutritionist and coach worked out he needed to drink every 10 minutes or he would blow. To save bottle weight, Froome was handed a new one at appropriate intervals all the way up the Colle delle Finestre. Drinking according to conditions is vital. “You just assume that because I drank

one bottle on my training ride last week, I’ll drink one bottle this week, regardless of conditions,” says Gallagher.

He points to a common mistake. Cool temperatures and a high volume of low to moderate intensity work associated with winter training lulls riders into not drinking enough. Appraise your wee, he suggests. “If you’ve just done a five-hour ride, you drank four bottles of electrolyte and you’ve still got a dark urine, that means actually after four hours you’re pretty dehydrated. You’ll need to look at that before doing six hours in the Alps.”

SMASH THE TURBO “Now it’s so much easier with Zwift around.

Meet your friends on there, do intervals, you can do an hour. You’ll keep very fit, you won’t lose much if you stay inside. If you commit to intervals it’s hard, and also it’s a short session, so you have time for other things like family and friends.” Simon Yates

Indoor training in the days of yore used to mean solitary confinement in the shed enduring excruciating boredom. Smart trainers and Zwift racing have turned turbo sessions into something fun, something to relish. “The arrival of Zwift has been overwhelmingly positive,” agrees Gallagher. But he did have a note of caution for riders with an outdoor goal. “It is almost too easy to do lots of intensity,” he said.

“What we’ve found is that people in winter do intensity consistently and potentially at times they shouldn’t be doing it. If you’re doing full-on intervals four days a week you’re building your anaerobic systems and it can actually take quite a long time to recover.” As a general rule of thumb, for riders who are moderately fit, a 36-hour gap between high-intensity sessions is sensible.

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WORDS CHRIS MCGUIRE

I L L U S T R AT I O N S P E N C E R W I L S O N

STUCK ON R E P E AT Humans are creatures of habit, but they’re not always good for us. How can we cut out the bad habits that are holding us back?

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STUCK ON REPEAT Cyclists are by no means immune from bad habits. From gorging on the wrong foods to ineffective signalling, wasting energy through bad technique to failing to maintain our precious kit, few of us can claim to be completely free of negative quirks. We decided to address these troublesome habits once and for all. We’ve roped in some willing experts to look at what many of us are doing wrong and to help us find the way to ditching these bad habits for good! You can thank us later.

BEFORE THE RIDE It’s perfectly possible to get into bad habits even before embarking on your two-wheeled steed – and we’re not talking about the hours you spend admiring your freshly shaved legs in a mirror.

PA STA POINT OF NO RETURN We’ve all done it. You’ve got a big ride in the morning so in order to be at your peak physical condition for hours in the saddle, you eat a year’s supply of pasta. Good idea, eh? Not really.

“The stereotypical thing for many cyclists to do before a race or a big ride is to have a massive bowl of pasta the night before,” says Peter Antonio, nutritionist and personal trainer. “It’s difficult to digest pasta, so it’s just going to be sitting there waiting to come out – which really isn’t going to be comfortable.

“Loading with carbs before every single ride is not necessary and can potentially limit the training adaptations from certain sessions and even lead to weight gain,” says James Moran, English Institute of Sport senior performance nutritionist working with British Cycling.

“The day before and the meal before, have more refined carbohydrates in the form of drinks (ie Lucozade),” says Peter Antonio. “The sodium in there will provide electrolytes and carbohydrates that will quickly get into your system.”

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D U D BO D You know how it is, you get home from work, squeeze into the Lycra and jump onto the bike. Before you know it, you’re zooming down the road without as much as a sniff of a warm-up or stretch. Warm-ups are for wimps, eh?

Well, no, not really. Unless your definition of a ‘wimp’ is someone avoiding injury and riding at their optimum level. “People don’t loosen themselves into it, especially if they’re using something like Strava, it’s like, ‘Bang’ and they’re into a ride!” says Matt Woodcock, training manager at Cycling UK. “If the warm-up doesn’t happen,” says Peter Antonio. “your body’s not going to be ready. Your performance is going to decrease – you’re not going to be able to perform as well as you could have if you’d warmed up appropriately.”

The warm up, Peter Antonio goes on to explain, should be proportionate for a ride: intense rides like a criterium need a long and intense warm up, while longer rides, in a steady ‘zone 2’ need a less intense approach. “Cyclists stereotypically have a tight posterior,” explains Peter, on the importance of stretching. “And at the front of the body the hip flexors are very tight.”

He recommends stretching the hip flexor group along the hamstring, groin, lower back and calves to “increase the rider’s ability to utilise their muscles without pulling one”.

Repeat after us: 'warming up is NOT for wimps'

DURING THE RIDE It’s easy to be caught in the moment. It’s just you, the open road and a lingering desire for cake.

Don’t be fooled, even when you’re in the zone, it’s so easy to get caught up in a bad habit (or two).

B O B B I N G ALO N G On a climb, it’s tempting to fall into a bobbing pattern – up and down out of the seat like a nodding dog on the parcel shelf of a hatchback. It’s one of those habits that means you expend far more energy than you need. Matt Woodcock isn’t a fan: “For me, especially on a long climb, I’d only be out of my seat at the point I need to be out if it.” Martin Burrows of KOM Coaching agrees: “Standing up and climbing is, at times, useful because you get a little bit more power to the pedals [and you can get your muscles firing in a different way].

But every time you stand up you’re burning more energy, because you’re holding the body up as well as pedalling. If people take it to extremes they’re wasting energy.”

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STUCK ON REPEAT

SIGNAL FAILUR E

Oops he did it again! Sudden braking is never appreciated

It may seem like we’re stating the obvious, but signals are vitally important. Not giving clear signals can sometimes feel like an endemic problem and is a common bad habit amongst cyclists.

“The biggest one is club riders riding really fast, in a group,” says Matt Woodcock. “They’re used to signalling for each other. Just a drop of a finger or a drop of a hand. Intending that to be the signal to cars. But unless you’re a rider you don’t know that.”

This bad habit is obviously serious as it stokes the negativity of drivers towards cyclists: “As riders we’re trying to get cars on side,” Matt continues. “So they know you’re about to turn or you’re about to pull in.

Give them as much warning as possible.”

Matt recommends making your signals big: “Be really overt, especially if you’re coming in and out of junctions, as well as making eye contact. Do it really early and then do it again.”

Club riders are used to signalling for each other. Just a drop of the hand intending for that to be a signal to cars

B R AK I N G HAB ITS There are a lot of bad habits when it comes to something as basic as slowing down on a bike. Martin Burrows sees elements of braking, like ‘feathering’ both brakes to come to a controlled stop, as skills that many cyclists haven’t yet mastered.

“There are certainly people who don’t know how to brake and don’t use both brakes – it’s not a good habit and can be very unsafe,” he says. Unexpected braking, especially when riding in a group, is a really bad habit.

“There are lots of people who slam the brakes on, especially if they’re cornering,” says Matt Woodcock.

Martin Burrows agrees: “When riding in a group there’s often someone behind you. You can’t see them, but you have to be aware that they’re there and not do anything (like braking) suddenly.”

“If I’m at the front of a group and I’m going to slow down,” Matt continues, “I’m going to tell everybody I’m slowing down. It pre-warns them. Especially if it’s quite dark.”

“It’s all about experience,” Martin considers, “and being considerate and aware of those around you.”

When riding in a group there’s often someone behind you. You can’t see them, but you have to be aware that they’re there

Be a good communicator when you're out on the road

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H U G S AN D N E AR M IS S E S ‘Hugging the kerb’ is a bad habit that many of us have got into and, frankly, it’s not the safest place to be! “For my generation, when they did cycling proficiency, the message was ‘hug the kerb’,” says Matt Woodcock. “But it’s not anymore. It’s about arming people with the knowledge that it’s okay to be that bit further out.” Riding closer to the primary position, in the centre of the lane, is recommended. “If you are slightly further out when people are going to overtake, they’ve got to do it properly,” Matt explains, “They’ve got to go into the other lane and cross the line. Whereas, if you hug the kerb, it allows them to come through.”

Riding close to the kerb means experiencing multiple hazards: “You have to navigate the holes, ditches and drains so you get that sort of weaving motion,” says Matt. “Whereas riders further out in the road can be seen better and if someone tries to overtake badly there’s still space to manoeuvre into, rather than already being on the far left and ending up in a hedge.” For more on road position, visit: cyclinguk.org/road-position.

Ducking, diving and weaving is not recommended for cyclists

MAK I N G S U R E YO U ’ R E H Y D R ATE D When it comes to drinking, most cyclists are guilty of consuming too many flat whites post-ride. However, the really bad habit is failing to properly hydrate during a ride and the experts agree that something must bidon (be done, sorry).

“If you’re dehydrated, nothing will work properly,” explains Peter Antonio. “You could have a perfect nutrition plan, but if your hydration isn’t up to par, it won’t work. It will affect everything, including your concentration.”

“Keeping hydrated is certainly something that cyclists need to be aware of,” says Martin Burrows.

“Initially force yourself to drink. People tend not to.

They forget until they become thirsty – which is a bit late. Some cyclists have an alarm set on their Garmin to remind them to have a drink.”

So how much liquid should we be drinking while riding?

“The general consensus,” says Peter Antonio, “is 500 to 700mls an hour.”

You could have a perfect nutrition plan, but if your hydration isn’t up to par, it won’t work...

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Dehydration will affect performance and concentration

Riding close to the kerb means you have to navigate the holes, ditches and drains – you get that sort of weaving motion

STUCK ON REPEAT

AFTER THE RIDE Bad cycling habits don't stop once you've finished the ride. Post-ride care of both yourself and your trusty steed will ultimately pay dividends in terms of your personal health and that of your bank balance....

( DO N ’ T ) LE T TH E M E AT C AK E Many of us finish our ride by gorging on millionaire’s shortbread, tiffin and cappuccino cakes at our favourite coffee shops – because we deserve it. Don’t we? “If you’re ravenous after a ride,” says Peter Antonio, “you’ve not carried out proper ride nutrition. Chocolate bars and cakes are nutritionally lacking in terms of micronutrients, vitamins and minerals,” Peter explains. “They don’t have a lot of (nutrition) in them, and after a hard workout you need to replenish the nutrients you’ve lost with highly nutritious foods, such as fruits, vegetables, pulses, grains, meat, normal starch and carbohydrates.”

James Moran also recommends ditching high-fat, high-sugar content food, such as cake, in favour of a meal with a good balance of carbohydrates, protein and fruits/vegetables, such as beans on toast or a three-egg omelette wrap with spinach and tomatoes, within an hour of finishing a ride.

Love your bike and learn how to clean it properly post-ride

LOVE TH E J O B S YO U HATE Many of us climb off our bike, throw it in the shed/garage and forget about it until the next time. But kicking the kit-maintenance can down the road is a bad habit that will eventually hit all cyclists in the pocket! “Often you’re tired and at the end of the ride you just want to go in and have a shower. But it’s important to keep on top of cleaning and maintaining your bike.” says Martin Burrows.

“If you let dirt build up each time it’s going wear all your bits and pieces out quicker and end up being expensive.”

“A lot of riders don’t know how to do simple bike maintenance,” says Matt Woodcock, “such as cleaning the drivechain and the chain. It’s a case of, ‘I’ll give it a wash and I’ll dry it off and leave it.’ But they don’t necessarily go any further.”

Matt recommends going online to get the hints and tips for cleaning and maintenance you need to break these bad habits. “You can Google or YouTube everything, especially cleaning the drivechain. It’s not as difficult as everyone thinks.”

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WORDS JAMES WIT TS PICTURES GET T Y IMAGES

FUFUELLING SECRETS ES ETS Fuelling your cycling performance doesn’t have to be about tasteless beetroot shakes, laboratory-spawned carbs and questionable supplements.

Simply follow these 10 easy feeding tweaks to forge a leaner, stronger you…

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FUELLING SECRETS

1 NATURAL RIDING REMEDY Cyclists pride themselves on managing and defeating pain.

And if they don’t, well, there’s always a painkiller such as Ibuprofen. (To all pros out there, not Tramadol, of course, as since March this year it’s been banned in competition.)

The problem is, long-term use of drugs such as Ibuprofen can threaten bone health, worsen respiratory conditions and even raise the risk of cardiac issues.

That’s why you should turn to a medicinal plant.

“When I was working with Katusha, one of my proudest achievements was finishing a Grand Tour with a full pack of riders,” says performance biochemist Dr Rob Child, who’s also worked with Dimension Data. “And that was heavily down to favouring garlic over painkillers. Why is down to its anti-inflammatory nature,

rather than painkillers that, while masking the pain, lengthen a fully healed return to health.”

Those anti-inflammatory benefits derive from polyphenols, whose levels rise by as much as 50 per cent when cooked. If you’re looking to thin your blood, however – particularly useful if you’re blood doping, of course! – you’ll have to brave raw bulbs as the sulphur compounds that are believed responsible for thinning blood aren’t ‘heat stable’. This means they’re rendered useless when cooked.

Those antiinflammatory benefits derive from polyphenols, whose levels rise by as much as 50 per cent when cooked 2 SERV SERVICING YOUR NEEDS The service servi station’s a necessity for many of us, provid providing a refuelling pit stop en route to a and back from work wor meetings.

The problem prob is, temptation’s rife, be it temptati shelves o of Scotch eggs, piles of p peanuts or pipes of P Pringles. So you have two options.

The first, according to Susan Je Jebb, an Oxford University professor Universit and advis advisor to Public Health En England on obesity, iis to always pay at th the pump so you

avoid the cascade of confectionary. The second is to choose Biltong. Biltong (a form of dried meat) is popping up all over the place because of its high-protein content.

Take a packet of Ember Biltong, which contains 18.8g protein. That’s textbook post-workout feeding. Carb and fat content, however, are negligible. Just beware of the sodium content of Biltong, even if that can prove fruitful when you’re in the heat.

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3 SLICE AND RECOVER You’ve completed a glorious three-hour Sunday morning ride.

The sun’s shining, temperatures are soaring and you’ve an afternoon barbecue lined up with friends and family. That means burgers, baps and beer. It also means the obligatory iceberg lettuce, which is great for hydration as water content’s up to 96 per cent. But there’s an added performance boost if you ‘wound’ your iceberg a day or two before.

According to a study out of the University of Pisa, by slicing your lettuce and popping it into a sealed plastic food bag overnight, you can increase polyphenol levels by 50 per cent. Polyphenols are compounds that have antioxidant properties and have been associated with improved oxygen uptake after exercise, meaning a swifter recovery. This increase is down to the leaves generating protective antioxidant compounds at the site of injury – much like blood coagulating into a scab when you suffer road rash!

By slicing lettuce & popping it into a sealed plastic food bag overnight, you can increase polyphenol levels by 50 per cent 4 BOOST HYDRATION LEVELS The NHS advises that you should drink six to eight glasses of water daily to keep hydrated.

For active cyclists, it’s arguably greater as cycling in hotter climes can see sweat loss tip over a litre an hour. The problem is, even those who love water might experience flavour fatigue, or lack of it in water’s case. That’s where a burst of pineapple juice comes in. Team Sky (now Ineos) has used it, and it was the idea of their former

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nutritionist Nigel Mitchell. He noted that once the riders had left the hotel dining table, it’d be swimming in half-drunk glasses of water. Cue the introduction of diluted pineapple juice and what Mitchell termed his ‘positive hydration strategy’, the taste of which saw an immediate fluid uplift.

But that’s not all. Mitchell had stolen the idea from his days working at the NHS. Pineapple contains an enzyme called bromelain, which has been shown to reduce inflammation and pain, and even inhibit the growth of cancer cells. Through a cycling lens, the breakdown of protein helps to repair muscle.

FUELLING SECRETS

5 STIR UP A NEW PB There are those who follow a clean-eating diet and graze on mountains of uncooked food.

Here at Cycling Plus, while we enjoy the occasional crudités, we’re after something a little more heart-warming, especially in the winter months. Which is an eating philosophy many clean eaters might want to follow after listening to Dr Child. “Many people don’t realise that some foods are more nutritious cooked compared to raw,” he explains. “That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of stir frying your vegetables.”

The causes of this are twofold: heat and fat. “Take a carrot. Crank up the heat and it breaks down the carrot’s

Beta-carotene’s an antioxidant that the body converts to vitamin A, which gives your immune system a boost

structure. If the heat is applied from oil it acts as a solvent, meaning you’ll absorb more of the beta-carotene you’ve digested than raw.”

The oil acts as a carrier from the intestine into the bloodstream, meaning less is lost through urine. And that’s important because betacarotene’s an antioxidant that the body converts to vitamin A,

which gives your immune system a boost.

The oil choice is key. “I’d recommend avocado oil because it has a high smoking point,” says Child. “The higher the smoking point, the less likely toxins or carcinogen will form.” Avocado oil’s not as uncommon as you might think – you can buy a 250ml bottle from Tesco for £2.70.

6 CHOOSE YOUR PANS WISELY There are materials you should avoid when it comes to cooking, especially aluminium.

Aluminium is common in most kitchens due to its low cost and ability to conduct heat

7 SPRIN SPRINKLE N OF SPEED When former Grange Hill starlet Michelle Gayle sang, ‘Your sweetness is my weakness’ she could have been talking about a cyclist’s love for a good slice of cake. A touch naughty but justified (the cake, not Gayle). But there’s a tasty substitute that’ll satiate your sugar cravings and improve performance. Over to Team Ineos chef Jon Cox. “For breakfast, I’ll always serve the riders porridge where

effectively. However, aluminium’s easily leached from the pan into your food, which is less than ideal as it’s toxic, albeit at high levels. Before you bin your new set of pans, however, there are steps you can take to lessen the problem.

Avoid cooking acidic foods in your aluminium pans as

the acid reacts with the surface and leaches even more.

That means no to low pH foods such as tomato sauce and yes to higher pH foods such as chicken.

Teflon and non-stick pans also have a bad rap, while cast iron and stainless steel are deemed the safest to use.

the oats have been soaked in almond milk and yoghurt overnight,” he says. Great but no fuelling fantasy. “I’ll also make them banana pancakes sprinkled with protein powder.” That’s better.

Just add a quarter-cup of protein powder to a traditional pancake mix and voilà – a breakfast whose egg and powder content will drive up muscle protein synthesis while the sliced bananas on top deliver a sharp energy hit for your impending ride.

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9 DON’T LEACH THE BENEFITS A Sunday roast is food of the gods and, if you go heavy on the veg, is packed with vitamins and minerals. But a simple tweak can impart even more nutritious (and taste) glory. “It’s well known that steaming or stir frying your vegetables is better than boiling because nutrients leach into the water,” says Dr Kevin Currell, head of performance nutrition at the English Institute of Sport. “If you do boil, make gravy with the water to retain the goodness.”

The nutrient content of your Sunday roast is also cranked up if you leave your potatoes dressed in their skin. The skin contains more than twice the amount of polyphenols as the flesh and a huge proportion of its vitamins and minerals.

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8 PASTA MASTERCLASS MASTERCLAS Carbohydrates might mig be vilified by seden sedentary folk as the root cau cause of their fatty deposits and lethargy – a lack of willpower, you’d counter!? – but the there’s undeniable undeni iable eviden evidence that iit’s t’s nectar to cyclists, especially during high-intens high-intensity segments such as climbs and sprints. It’s why your larder’s packed with pasta pasta…

However, your choice of pasta and how you cook it impacts how energised you’ll be on your ride. “Our chef tends to cook al dente

[firm to the bite],” says Katusha doctor Dag Van Elsende. “It breaks down much more slowly than when cooked normally and so releases its energy more gradually.”

To fuel longer rides, also consider the size and thickness of your pasta. Research shows that while the chunkiest linguine ribbons has a moderate GI of around 68 (glycaemic index, a measure of how quickly carbs impact bloodglucose levels; a low number is slow release, high number fast), rolling the same dough much thinner cranks it up to 87. For those of you whose Waitrose

If you boil your vegetables, make gravy with the water to retain the goodness usually lost through boiling

trip isn’t complete without a fresh batch of pasta, listen up…

The cheaper alternative actually requires a high temperature to dry it out, altering its protein structure, forming a more rigid barrier around the starch grains and so delivering its energy more slowly when broken down.

Elsewhere, doctor at Mitchelton Scott Matteo Beltemacchi says, “Your liver can suffer over a long ride so ensure your protein intake is gentle on your body,” he says.

“I always recommend a recovery drink that’s mixed with water rather than milk.”

FUELLING SECRETS 10 A FAT ALTERNATIVE A survey by YouGov suggests two-thirds of us eat fish less often than the recommended twice a week. (The over-55s were slightly better pupils, with 45 per cent consuming enough.) And that’s performance-inhibiting due to cyclists missing out on an array of vital vitamins and minerals, particularly the Peter Sagan of the fatty-acid world: omega-3.

“Research shows that omega-3 protects the heart, controls blood pressure and maintains a lean bodyweight,” says celeb cycling chef Hannah Grant, who’s worked with Mitchelton-Scott and the disbanded Tinkoff-Saxo. “It also benefits blood and muscle function by acting as a cleanser, making blood less sticky and more fluid. This allows more oxygen to reach the cyclist’s brain and muscles, ensuring faster riders.”

It’s an anti-inflammatory, too, and helps break down existing fat by activating fat-burning pathways in the liver. Enough to convince you that fishy breath is worth it?

No? Okay, here’s an alternative.

“Cold-pressed flax seed oil is high in omega-3, which is why I add it to the riders’ smoothies in the morning,” says Grant.

“We make sure many of the meals we cook contain foods high in omega-3, such as chia seeds and nuts.”

Research shows that omega-3 protects the heart, controls blood pressure and maintains a lean bodyweight

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Xxxxxxxx UP VS DOWN Can expert descending make up for climbing shortcomings,

and vice versa? We head to the Swiss Alps to find out…

Climber VS Descender

Words John Whitney Photography Joseph Branston

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Greg Henderson knows a thing or two about going downhill fast. A professional cyclist of 16 years until 2017 – 10 of those spent at the top WorldTour level – this Kiwi rode 10 Grand Tours as a sprinter and lead-out man. Six foot tall and 71 kilos, on the days in between leading out the likes of André Greipel for sprint victories, he was a paid-up member of the grupetto – the group of riders that forms at the rear end of Grand Tour stages such as the Tour de France, particularly during the mountain stages. Its composition is a mixture of riders who’ve done their work and dropped back, stage hunters taking a break for the day, general classification riders who’ve catastrophically blown up or those who’ve been dropped early on. As a lead-out man working for his team’s main sprinter, Henderson would often be in that final category finding himself at the back of the race and often chasing time cuts, which if missed would see him booted out of the race, so an ability to go downhill quickly was a prerequisite for the job.

Now a cycling coach (coachhendy.com), Greg believes it’s a misconception that the guys at the front of the race are the best descenders. “On TV, you only see the leaders in the mountains. If you put a camera on the sprinters you’d be impressed to see how fast we go downhill. We can take three or four minutes out of the leaders on a descent, so if we’re six minutes off them at the top, we know we can halve that by the bottom. We’ve got the power to sprint out of corners, we’ve got gravity on our side and the bike handling skills of a sprinter.”

Even at the WorldTour level, the range of descending skills is vast.

“A lot of the guys who go uphill fast are the slowest downhill. Euskadi [Euskaltel–Euskadi, the Basque team that disbanded in 2013], they were a team full of climbers. We used to call them mobile road cones, because you had to go round them on the descent. For some reason they could just not go downhill.”

This imbalance between climbing and descending skills is something I’ve always been fascinated by. It’s strange it even exists at the pinnacle of the sport. You’d think the disparity, once there, wouldn’t be so big. But at our level, as club riders, the gap is a yawning chasm. We’ve heard anecdotal tales of Joe Schmo being a faster descender than paid up WorldTour professionals, and at the other end of the spectrum there are riders – and I’d put myself in this category – who are tentative to the extent that simply getting down safely to the start of the next climb is the only goal.

The Furka Pass challenge It was with this in mind that ‘Climber vs Descender’ came about. It would pitch me, a 75kg climb lover with nothing short of an allergy to downhills, against my colleague Steve Fearn, Cycling Plus’s marketing manager, who doesn’t much care for going upwards but combines his skill, confidence and 110kg heft to dizzying effect on the downhills. We’d head to the Swiss Alps, and the Furka Pass (2,431m), a 12.3km climb that gains 893m (7.3 per cent) for a one-on-

Steve Fearn A confident descender, but was it enough to catch John?

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UP VS DOWN Head to head numbers

Average

Max

Descending Climbing

John Whitney Steve Fearn

Speed

Cadence

Heart rate

John Whitney Will the Zwift sessions and training pay off on the climb?

one challenge against each other, up and over it. As you may have read in last issue’s Big Ride, the choice of the Furka was no accident, given that the car chase in the James Bond classic Goldfinger was filmed here. We’d record the ride with GPS, cadence and heart rate and examine it to find out how far good descending can take you and how we could improve our all-round mountain game.

From Andermatt, the ski resort where we were staying, Steve and I rode over to the ‘start line’ in the town of Realp, several kilometres up the valley where, at the Furka Pass sign in the town, and with a harmonious beep of our computers, the ride proper began.

Immediately, I began to gap Steve.

“I guess I’ll see you over the top,” he said. I would indeed, but precisely where, time would tell.

Steve is a Land’s End to John o’Groats veteran, but riding in the high mountains was breaking new ground. But he’s a marketeer and loves a bit of analysis ahead of his bike rides. So with a test of fitness, a Strava segment analysis, Google and a Furka profile study, he reckoned upon an average target heart rate of 160 beats per minute – the top end of his zone 4 heart rate – for the climb, just below his lactate threshold; a sensible idea, which means his body can get rid of lactate faster than it accumulates.

“I found in training for this that my endurance in zone 5 is nonexistent and I needed a long recovery after being in it for a minute or two,” says Steve. “But my body was happy with zone 4.”

I did no such calculations, but knew roughly, having done enough Zwift sessions over the past year, that I can sustain zone 5 heart rate for a good chunk of time, and have ridden enough mountain passes to understand their rhythms.

Come the summit, Steve had, commendably, not wavered from his target – bob on 160bpm, in fact, and never breaking into the 170s during 1hr 20 minutes of climbing. Mine was a ventricle-busting 180bpm, 95 per cent of my max heart rate, over a neat and tidy one hour of climbing. That means it falls in the top zone 6 of British Cycling’s scale – “a 100 per cent sprint involving maximal effort” is how they describe it as a feeling. I’m not sure whether I should finish this sentence or call the doctor…

“It depends on how many passes you’ve got to ride,” says Henderson. “If you’ve only got one, like you two, sure, head out at threshold [FTP, or functional threshold power – the power/heart rate you can sustain for an hour], but if you have two, three or four, stay within your realms: 85 per cent of your max heart rate is a good target, and don’t go above 90 per cent.”

One thing that wasn’t measured but something we can mention anecdotally is position on the bike when climbing. Neither me or Steve are the sort of riders who get out of the saddle very often.When we do, it’s only to mix our position up and give our backsides a rest. A wise move, says Henderson.

“When you go above 80kg, there’s an energy cost to getting out of the saddle. That’s why the bigger riders stay seated the whole time. If they’re 60, 65kg, it costs them no extra energy in their hands and arms. That’s the advantage: that they’re able to change their muscle firing patterns. [By standing], you’re using the same muscles, of course, but the firing patterns are different. You can go dull after 45 minutes in the same position.”

What about cadence? “You don’t want to be doing 60rpm, then no one is comfortable at 100,” says Henderson. “The sweetspot is between 80 to 90rpm. If you have a gear ratio that can land you at that cadence you’ll be fine for most climbs.”

I averaged 83rpm for the climb, whereas Steve’s was much lower, at 64. That led Henderson to suggest Steve was “slogging a big one”.

High gears and low rpm mean an increase in torque, “one of the hidden factors that cause a lot of muscle fatigue” says Henderson.

This probably wasn’t the case with Steve. With a low gear of 34/32, which he was in the whole way up, his low cadence was likely the result of disciplined pacing, though he might want to try my Giant Defy, with its 34/34 to put even less stress on his body.

Pacing was key to Steve’s climbing success, which isn’t always the done thing for riders new to high mountains, who can get both over-

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Gletsch (22km) Gradient

Oberalpenstafel

Belvédére

Furka Pass (12km)

Sidelenbach

Tiefenbach

Galenstock

Climb & descent profile Realp (0km)

awed and carried away if they’re used to the kilometre climbs of home. There’s common ground in breaking a long climb down into sections from pro riders through to us.

“I’d do exactly that,” says Henderson. “Get to that tree, the next corner, the next bunch of riders.

If you break it down into achievable goals it’s less overwhelming. If it’s your first Alp, you’re going to be a little intimidated, a little pensive. To do 160bpm I’m sure he’s held back in the beginning.”

I reached the summit on my absolute limit after an hour’s climbing and, though I wouldn’t know this until the end, Steve would arrive 20 minutes later, meaning I had that amount of time in hand to play with for the remaining 10km of descent. If you think that’s more than enough, you’ve never seen me descend.

I make a habit of wasting time on mountain summits, even when I’m notionally racing colleagues. In gran fondos it’s always where feed stations are situated and I like to refuel off the bike because I’m so incapable of doing it on the downhill. Here, I lost over a minute putting my arm warmers on for the descent. Did I need to? No, it was actually quite pleasant out. It was merely habit born out of an abundance of caution.

Still, it appears I’m in good company. “We were doing the Mortirolo, in the 2010 Giro d’Italia,” says Henderson. “I was out the back, I’d stopped for a nature break but it was okay, I was in grupetto, so there was no problems catching back on. Then Froomey [Sky teammate that year] comes past. We went across the summit together and we’re still off the back, and I said, ‘Come on, we can catch them on the descent.’ And he’s fluffing around for his bloody rain jacket and I’m like, ‘F**k your rain jacket, let’s go!’ I waited and waited for two or three minutes until I said, ‘Mate, I’ve gotta go.’ So I descended really hard, chased like mad in the valley and caught [the grupetto] before the final climb. And [Froome] is five minutes behind and gets caught holding onto a car? [he was disqualified for holding onto a motorbike – Ed]. He got DQ’d because he didn’t follow.”

Stopping unnecessarily to slip on arm warmers was just the start of my descending woes. A paltry top speed of 49.5km/h, a max cadence of 58, zone 2 average heart rate, a few bursts of pedalling and long spells of freewheeling is, in short, the story of my (21-minute long!) descent. Steve’s was a different story: a 71km/h top speed, a heart rate that went over 150bpm at times (close to his climbing average) and regular bursts of cadence, where he’d sprint out of corners. With a time of 13 minutes, he’d claw back eight minutes of time on me in just 10km of descent – equal to around 300ft of elevation from the opening section of the climb.

3 9 9 8 8 8 8 5 5 7 9 8 2 8 8 9 6 5 6 6 6 6 3 %

UP VS DOWN

Heart rate John's average HR reached only zone 2 going down

straight after, I’d have been in trouble – and possibly spent time removing my arm warmers!

“It’s going to take you several minutes to get going again, with all the metabolites that have built up from the climb,” says Henderson. “I have this trick that I learned during my Sky days. You’d be riding around 70km/h and we’d pull on our brakes and do 10 pedal strokes hard with them still on, to make sure the legs were still firing for when we got back onto the climb.”

Skills for the win “You want power spikes out of the corners,” says Henderson, “bursts of cadence, where you get straight back onto the speed. It’s only 10 pedal strokes but if you do them hard you’re back onto 70km/h. Someone who cruises out of the corner will take 20 seconds to get back to that speed. For someone who’s accelerated, it might be half that.

Across 10 corners you’ve already taken 100 seconds and you can see how it adds up.”

Given that we were stopping at the bottom of the descent, we could concentrate simply on getting down, but if this were a longer ride or event, with two of three more mountain passes to come, the descents (should you not have stopped at the summit) are a time to recover and refuel, because it’s hard to do so during the climb.

“You’re at altitude, where your body asks for carbohydrate but you’re under the pressure of the effort so it’s hard to reach for your bottle all the time,” says Henderson. “Take time on the descent to regain your hydration status. This can increase gastric emptying [processing the food you eat] and ensure you’re loaded with fuel for the next climb.

You’ll be better on the fourth climb because you’ve taken the time early on.”

Aside from losing speed by coasting down the descent, should I have had another climb to do

Over the whole Furka Pass, I put 12 minutes into Steve. But eight of those 20 hard-earned minutes on the climb were squandered by a lack of skill, know-how and focus on the way back down.

Of course, it pays to hone your fitness for the mountains – it’ll save you time, you’ll lose less strength as a longer day goes on and you’ll recover better for the following day. But there’s an argument to say that gains over mountain rides are easier to find by improving descending skills, particularly as fitness gains get harder to eke out.

At the time of the ride, I was in pretty decent shape, with an FTP of 272 watts. Without any descending improvements, to compensate for the eight minutes I lost to Steve downhill, I’d have to climb at 14.19km/h, almost 2km/h faster than I did. That’s considerable and would mean further hard training and weight loss (and I’m not particularly sold on either).

If descending struggles is something that sounds familiar with you, this isn’t about becoming some sort of daredevil overnight, or even at all, or flying round corners like a Moto GP rider. It’s about making achievable gains, such as sprinting out of corners if you don’t carry your momentum through them. If you can climb the Furka Pass for an hour in zone 6, you can surely stomp on your pedals for a few seconds coming out of a bend.

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SPORTIVE TRAINING PLAN

KNOW YOUR HEART RATE ZONES SO YOU CAN TARGET AREAS YOU WANT TO DEVELOP OR ENSURE YOU DON’T OVERCOOK IT.

Whether you’re a sportive veteran or virgin, you need to start training now to get the most from your event. Handily, we have a three-month plan.

ZONE 1 (<60% HRMAX) – EASY ZONE 2 (70%) – SLOW ZONE 3 (75%) – STEADY ZONE 4 (80%) – BRISK ZONE 5 (85%) – TEMPO ZONE 6 (90-100%) – HARD

FIRST 4 WEEKS et your goal and be realistic. If you’ve ridden an event before, are you hoping to shave minutes off your previous time? If you did the standard length route of a sportive last year, are you going to aim for the epic length this time?

Don’t put yourself off, though – if you only took up cycling recently, don’t enter a mammoth ride up the Alps.

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FIRST TIMER: Aim for an event of 40-80 miles with moderate rather than epic amounts of climbing. The Beeston CC Sportive (www.beeston.cc/sportive) takes place in June through the Peak District. It has a choice of a 47-mile and 75-mile routes (as well as a 111-mile route) which would be a good option while still presenting a challenge.

THINK BIG: You don’t have to go abroad to really challenge yourself. The UK offers some tough and seriously hilly rides, many of them well over 100 miles in length. The Dragon Ride (www. dragonride.co.uk) on 7th June offers the 298km Dragon Devil course with plenty of climbing, as well as the two or threeday Dragon Tour starting 5th June.

BEGINNERS MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

WEEK 1

Check your bike and kit over, making sure everything is ready for you to begin riding tomorrow

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted (no breakfast – exercising fasted can encourage the use of more stored fat as fuel), at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride over moderate terrain, ideally with a few mates or a club so you can practise riding in a group

Two short sessions ideally – 30-40mins am and pm. Do the morning ride fasted, and the evening ride with an 8sec fast effort every 5mins

Rest

Endurance: 30-40% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 more than 75% of ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, a 1hr ride concentrating on a higher than normal cadence

WEEK 2

Recovery day.

Ideally, get a massage or at least perform self-massage of your leg muscles, especially your quads

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1:30hr evening ride, mainly low Zone 2, but include the longest hills you can find for a total of 30mins controlled hard climbing work

Choice day, working on your area of weakness. You could do some extra morning fasted work up to 2hrs

Rest

Endurance: 40-50% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 more than 75% of ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr ride in a bigger than normal gear (cadence of 50-60rpm), pushing your effort on inclines for the middle 20mins

WEEK 3

Rest

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at top of Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride including hilly terrain, working out your best Zone 2 pace to stay smooth with controlled breathing

Choice day, working on your area of weakness. You could do some extra morning fasted work up to 1:30hrs

This is the second rest day of the week. No riding at all. Chill out

Endurance: 50-60% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 more than 75% of ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr ride in a bigger than normal gear (cadence of 50-60rpm), pushing your effort on inclines for the middle 20mins

WEEK 4

Total rest day; spend time getting bike mechanics sorted, kit organised, rides planned and nutrition bought/ organised

45 mins ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr ride working on an area of weakness: could be climbing, descending, cornering or group riding

Rest

Rest

Endurance: no more than 25% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 more than 90% of ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr light spin with 8sec efforts every 6mins

70 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

SPORTIVE TRAINING

EXPERIENCED MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

WEEK 1

30mins light spin indoors or on flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted (no breakfast beforehand – exercising fasted can encourage the use of more stored fat as fuel), at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride, either intervals of 5-8mins (equal work and recovery) in mid Zone 2, or chaingang/group ride on moderate terrain: aim for 30mins hard work

Two sessions if you can, moderate Zone 1 effort: 40mins fasted in the morning, 40mins rolling terrain, taking in only water in the evening

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin indoors or on flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

Endurance: 40% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 for more than 75% of your ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr ride in a bigger than normal gear (cadence of 50-60rpm), pushing your effort on inclines for the middle 20mins

WEEK 2

Recovery day.

Ideally, get a massage or at least self-massage your leg muscles, especially your quads. Optional 30mins light spin indoors or on flat terrain

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1:30hr evening ride, low Zone 2 on the longest climbs you can find for a total of 30mins controlled hard climbing work

Choice day, working on your area of weakness. You could do some extra morning fasted work up to 2hrs

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin on rollers or flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

Endurance: 50% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 for more than 75% of your ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr ride in a bigger than normal gear (cadence of 50-60rpm), pushing your effort on inclines for the middle 20mins

WEEK 3

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin indoors or on flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

Light day – your choice of training but be mindful of tomorrow’s session

1hr evening ride, either intervals of 5-8mins (equal work and recovery) in mid Zone 2, or chaingang: aim for 30-35mins hard work

Two sessions if you can, moderate Zone 1 effort: 60 mins fasted in the morning, 40mins rolling terrain, taking in only water in the evening

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin indoors or on flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

Endurance: 60% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 for more than 75% of your ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr ride in a bigger than normal gear (cadence of 50-60rpm), pushing your effort on inclines for the middle 30mins

WEEK 4

Total rest day; spend time getting bike mechanics sorted, kit organised, rides planned and nutrition bought/ organised

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1:20hr evening ride in chaingang/ group, but riding to save energy – let others do the work on this one

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

Rest day. Leave the bike alone. Try to get to bed early for the next four nights

Endurance: 30% of event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 for more than 90% of your ride time

Sat ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1hr light spin with 8sec efforts every 6mins

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TO BE MORE PRECISE ABOUT HOW MUCH LIQUID TO CONSUME WHILE RIDING, MEASURE YOUR SWEAT RATE. WEIGH YOURSELF NAKED BEFORE AND AFTER A 1HR RIDE, TAKING INTO ACCOUNT ANY LIQUID CONSUMED. THE DIFFERENCE IS YOUR SWEAT RATE PER HOUR.

WEEKS 5-8

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tart thinking about how your energy levels change as you train more, and how you might need to adjust what you eat and drink as you ride.

FED UP: Consume at least 1g of carbohydrate per kg of bodyweight for every hour that you ride to keep your glycogen levels high enough to function to the best of their ability. Take it in the

form of carb-electrolyte drinks, bars, gels, solid food or any combination you like.

This isn’t an exact science so practise on your training rides. You don’t want to get it wrong on event day and end up feeling weak from under-fuelling or sick from over-fuelling.

STAY HYDRATED: Replacing spent fluids is essential to enable your body to

keep going throughout your rides.

On rides longer than an hour, use drinks containing carbohydrates and electrolytes instead of plain water. Try an energy drink that is 5-7% carbs as this is the same as your body fluids and the best for absorbing into the body. If it doesn’t feel quite right, experiment with hypotonic fluids that have a carb content of less than 5%.

BEGINNERS MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

WEEK 5

Rest

45-60min ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride, with a few mates or a cycle club. Aim for moderate terrain and concentrate on group-riding skills

Two short sessions if possible: 30-40mins morning and evening. Do your morning ride fasted, and evening ride with 8sec fast efforts every 5mins

Rest

Endurance: 50-60% of event distance on a hilly course. Stay in Zone 1 on flats and low to mid Zone 2 on hills

Saturday ride if missed. Otherwise, 1:20hr ride in big gear, pushing on inclines for the middle 30mins

WEEK 6

Recovery day.

Ideally, get a massage or at least perform self-massage.

Optional 30mins light spin on turbo or flat terrain

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1:30hr evening ride, low Zone 2, on the longest climbs you can find for a total of 30mins controlled hard climbing work

Choice day, working on an area of weakness. You could do some extra morning fasted work up to 2hrs

Rest

Endurance: 65-70% of event distance on a hilly course. Stay in Zone 1 on flats and low to mid Zone 2 on hills

Saturday ride if missed. Otherwise, 1:30hrs with speed practice on the descents and 5-6 1min Zone 3 efforts with 2-3mins spin recovery

WEEK 7

Rest

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted at top of Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr ride on hilly terrain, climbing at Zone 2 pace, staying smooth and relaxed

Choice day, working on an area of weakness. You could do some extra morning fasted work up to 1:30hrs

Rest

Endurance: 60% of event distance on the hilliest course you can find, or ride a sportive event. Stay in upper Zone 1 on flats and Zone 2 on hills

Saturday ride if missed. Otherwise, 1:20hr ride with speed practice on the descents for the middle 40mins

WEEK 8

Total rest day; spend time getting bike mechanics sorted, kit organised, rides planned and nutrition bought/ organised

45mins ride, in the morning ideally, fasted at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr ride working on an area of weakness – could be climbing, descending or feeding in the saddle

Rest

Rest

Endurance: 30-40% of event distance on flat terrain in low to mid Zone 1

Saturday ride if missed. Otherwise, 1hr light spin with 8sec efforts every 6mins

72 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

SPORTIVE TRAINING

EXPERIENCED MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

WEEK 5

Recovery day.

Optional 35-40mins light spin on rollers/ turbo or flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

1:20hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted (exercising fasted is a means of encouraging the use of more stored fat as fuel) at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride, either intervals of 5-8mins (equal work and recovery) in mid Zone 2 to Zone 3, or chaingang. Aim for 30-40mins of hard work

Two sessions as an option: 1hr fasted in the morning and 40mins on rolling terrain in the evening, drinking water only

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin on rollers/ turbo or flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

Endurance: 60% of event distance on a hilly course. Stay in Zone 1 on flats and low to mid Zone 2 on hills

Saturday ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1:30hr ride in big gear, pushing on inclines for the middle 30mins

WEEK 6

1hr morning or evening ride; Zone 1 effort, either indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted (no breakfast beforehand) at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

2hr evening ride, low Zone 2 on the longest climbs you can find for a total of 30-40mins controlled hard climbing work

Choice day, working on your area of weakness; you could do some extra morning fasted work up to 2hrs

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin, low Zone 1, on rollers or flat terrain, legs feeling no pressure

Endurance: 70% of event distance on a hilly course. Stay in Zone 1 on flats and low to mid Zone 2 on hills

Saturday ride if missed. Otherwise, 1:30hr with speed practice on the descents and 5-6 1min Zone 3 efforts with 2-3mins spin recovery

WEEK 7

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin on rollers/ turbo or flat terrain (low Zone 1), legs feeling no pressure

Light day – your choice of training but be mindful of what’s coming up tomorrow

1hr evening ride, either intervals of 5-8mins (equal work and recovery) in mid Zone 2 to Zone 3, or chaingang. Aim for 50mins of hard work

Two sessions on this day as an option: 1hr fasted in the morning and 1hr rolling terrain in the evening, drinking water only

Rest day. Try to get to bed early for the next four nights

Endurance: 60% of event distance on the hilliest course you can find, or ride a sportive event. Stay in upper Zone 1 on flats and Zone 2 on hills

Saturday ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1:30hr ride with speed practice on the descents for the middle 40mins

WEEK 8

Total rest day.

Spend time getting bike mechanics sorted, kit organised, rides planned and nutrition bought/ organised

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1:20hr evening ride in chaingang/ group, but riding to save energy – let others do the work

1hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

Rest day. Try to get to bed early for the next four nights

Endurance: 40% of event distance but on flat terrain in low to mid Zone 1

Saturday ride if it was missed. Otherwise, 1:20hr light spin with 8sec efforts every 6mins

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YOUR THEORETICAL MAX HEART RATE IS 220 MINUS YOUR AGE, BUT TO FIND YOUR TRUE RATE, WARM UP, THEN INCREASE YOUR WORKLOAD GRADUALLY UNTIL YOU CAN NO LONGER MAINTAIN THE EFFORT. THE HIGHEST RECORDED HEART RATE IS YOUR MAXIMUM.

WEEKS 9-12 f you’ve planned it correctly, there isn’t long to go now – just time to make a few last minute adjustments to your riding and your bike. But don’t change too much – saddles, pedals, even shorts need to be tried out in advance.

I

at a steadier pace so you leave something in the tank for later, and be careful not to blow your legs on the first climb and not be able to finish. A heart rate monitor will help you stay under 85% of your HR max on the hills.

PACE: Adrenaline on event day might make you feel like starting off all guns blazing, but you’ll only suffer for it. Start

PREPARE YOUR BIKE: If you’ve been training as hard as you should, chances are your bike will need some TLC. Having

it serviced a few weeks before event day is a good idea. That way, if any changes or repairs are made you’ll get in a few training rides to make sure they are working okay before the big day On race day, give your bike a final check before heading to the start of the race. This is particularly important if you’ve travelled far as your bike is more likely to have had a few knocks.

BEGINNERS MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

WEEK 9

Rest

45-60min ride, ideally in the morning, fasted, and keep in mid Zone 1, either indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride with a few mates or a cycle club.

Aim for moderate terrain and work on your group riding skills

Two short sessions on this day if possible, 30-40mins morning and evening. Do your morning ride fasted and the evening ride with an 8sec fast effort every 5mins

Rest

Endurance: 50% of event distance on a hilly course. Stay in Zone 1 on flats and low to mid Zone 2 on the hills

Do the Saturday ride if you missed it.

Otherwise, 1:20hr ride in a big gear pushing on the inclines for the middle 40mins

WEEK 10

Recovery day. Get a massage or perform a self-massage. A 30min light spin is optional on rollers or flat terrain

Optional 1hr ride, in the morning. Fasted at moderate Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1:30hr ride, low Zone 2, on the longest climbs you can find for a total of 30mins controlled, hard climbing work

Choice day, working on an area you know is weakest; you could do some extra morning fasted work up to 2hrs

Rest

Endurance ride of 40% event distance on the hilliest terrain you can find. Stay in upper Zone 1 on flats and Zone 2 on hills

Do the Saturday ride if you missed it.

Otherwise, a 1:30hr ride with descending at speed practice and 5-6 1min efforts in Zone 3 with a 2-3min spin recovery in between

WEEK 11

Rest

Two short sessions ideally, 30-40mins morning and evening. Do the morning ride fasted and the evening ride with an 8sec fast effort every 5mins

1hr ride on hilly terrain, climbing at Zone 2 pace, staying smooth and relaxed

The first of a double rest day to ensure that all your hard work is absorbed

This is the second rest day. No riding at all. Chill out.

Endurance ride of 30-40% event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 for at least 75% of the time

Do the Saturday ride if you missed it.

Otherwise, do a 1:20hr ride, practising descending at speed for 30mins

WEEK 12

Rest day. Spend time getting your event kit sorted, travel organised, ride food and nutrition sussed

1hr ride with some top of Zone 1 3-5min climbs on moderate terrain.

Aim for 30mins of hard work

1hr ride working on an area of weakness – perhaps climbing, descending or feeding while in the saddle

1hr light spin with 8sec efforts every 6mins to test your legs’ responses. No more than this; it’s time to store glycogen

Rest

Some riders like a light spin on the day before an event to keep their legs loose, others prefer not to – it’s your choice

Goal event. Enjoy it!

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SPORTIVE TRAINING

EXPERIENCED MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

WEEK 9

Recovery day.

Optional 40-45min light spin on rollers/ turbo or flat terrain (in low Zone 1), no pressure on the legs

1:30hr ride, in the morning ideally, fasted, at mid Zone 1 effort, indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr evening ride, either intervals of 5-8mins (equal work and recovery) in mid Zone 2 to Zone 3, or chaingang: aim for 30-40mins of hard work

Two sessions on this day if possible – 60mins fasted in the morning and 60mins rolling terrain in the evening, drinking water only

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin on rollers or flat terrain at low Zone 1, legs feeling no pressure

Endurance ride of 50% event distance on a hilly course. Stay in Zone 1 on flat land and low to mid Zone 2 on hills

Do the Saturday ride if you missed it.

Otherwise, 1hr ride in a big gear, pushing hard on the inclines for the middle 50mins

WEEK 10

1hr morning or evening ride in Zone 1, either indoors or on moderate terrain

1hr ride, in the morning, fasted, at mid Zone 1 effort, either indoors or on moderate terrain

2hr evening ride in low Zone 2 on the longest climbs you can find, staying controlled for 30-50 mins of hard climbing

Choice day, working on an area of weakness; you could do some morning fasted work up to 2hrs

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin in low Zone 1 on rollers or flat terrain, legs should not feel pressure

Endurance ride of 40% event distance on the hilliest course you can find. Stay in upper Zone 1 on flats and Zone 2 on hills

Do the Saturday ride if you missed it.

Otherwise, practise 2hrs of descending at speed as well as 5-6 1min, Zone 3 efforts with 2-3min spin recovery in between

WEEK 11

Recovery day.

Optional 1hr light spin in low Zone 1 on rollers/turbo or flat terrain, legs should not feel any pressure

A day of light training – it’s your choice what to do but be mindful of tomorrow’s plan

1hr evening ride, either intervals of 5-8mins (equal work and recovery) in mid Zone 2 to Zone 3 or chaingang: aim for 30mins of hard work

The first of a double rest day to allow your body to absorb all the hard work you’ve done

Rest day. Get away from the bike and try to get to bed early every night before the big day

Endurance ride of 30-40% event distance on a moderate to rolling course. Stay in Zone 1 at least 75% of the time

Do the Saturday ride if you missed it.

Otherwise, 1:30hr ride with descending at speed practice for the middle 30mins

WEEK 12

Total rest day – spend time getting bike mechanics sorted, kit organised, rides planned and food stocked up

1hr evening ride with some top of Zone 1, 3-5min climbs on moderate terrain.

Aim for a total of 30mins hard work

1hr evening ride solo, practise on the descents and check the bike works okay. You should be feeling full of energy

Optional 1hr light spin in Zone 1 with 8sec efforts every 6mins to keep your legs alert. No more than this; it’s time to store glycogen

Rest day. Get your kit ready, get the travel details and race route in your mind. Then chill

Some riders like a light spin the day before an event to keep their legs loose, others don’t – it’s up to you

Goal event. Have fun!

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76 ROAD CYCLISTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TRAINING MANUAL

ULTRA CYCLING

HOW ULTRA-DISTANCE CYCLISTS STAY THE COURSE WORDS TREVOR WARD IMAGES HENRY IDDON, GETTY

ROAD CYCLISTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TRAINING MANUAL 77

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E X PE R T S

Training for a 100-mile sportive is one thing, but how do you prepare to ride across countries and continents? We gathered together the cream of the crop of ultra-distance cyclists to find the secrets to their success...

MAR K B E AU MONT Adventurer who, in 2018, broke the round-the-world record, riding 18,000 miles in 78 days

JAM E S HAYDE N Elite road racer and winner of the last two editions of the TransContinental Race

P R E PA R ATI O N MAR K B E AU MONT In the good old days, training for endurance cycling was going out and doing mega miles at a slow pace. But if you want to race these days then you’re going ultra light, bikepacking or supported and, ultimately, it’s about not breaking down, not getting injured. So it’s never about your power-toweight ratio in the traditional sense, or how fast you are away from the traffic lights, it’s about if you can hack it, if you can physically suffer day in, day out.

J E N NY G R AHAM My ride was unsupported so my biggest worry was the massive gaps on the map between food and water places, but once I’d worked out the remotest stretches and the time needed to get between them, and got all my visas and flights, I had to let go. I couldn’t plan every detail of every day.

FACT

Completed a world record 4200-mile triathlon in 85 days around the coast of Great Britain in 2016

S E AN CONWAY I spent hours on Google Street View scrolling down roads to see if the quality is good, if they have a hard shoulder. In some parts of the world they’ll be tracks rather than hard tops.

Within that planning you have to think of what I call ‘showstoppers’ – what could go wrong. Things like bad weather, injury, getting run over, falling asleep on the bike, catastrophic mechanical failure - what are you going to do to limit those things from happening? So you

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JENNY G R AHAM Fastest woman to cycle around the world, completing it in 124 days selfsupported

S E AN CONWAY Completed fastest self-supported ride across Europe, cycling 3890 miles in 24 days

J OE BAR R Endurance coach and winner in his age category (60-69) at the 2019 Race Across America bike race

might pack hi-viz, choose your road surfaces very carefully, take vitamins with you so you don’t get flu.

JAM E S HAYDE N For newbies, do some longer rides first, don’t jump in at the deep end.

The learning curve is very sharp. Try some audaxes or ride from sunrise to sunset, or through the night, and see how you like it.

Bike fit is crucial. It’s not just the contact points, any part of your body could suffer if you don’t get that right.

J OE BAR R I’m currently coaching Christina Mackenzie who is attempting to beat the women’s record – 52 hours 45 minutes - for Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer. She’s doing it supported so the most crucial thing is assembling a crew she can trust and who will take care of all the logistics and housekeeping. She also needs to build a relationship with each section of the route, meaning she needs to recce the whole journey. If you’re serious about breaking a record you need to know what you’re dealing with. You need to have a picture in your head of what the route looks like and know what to do if you get to that bridge and it’s closed.

TR A I N I N G M B Unlike most roadies I’ll do other stuff including a lot of work on my core, which is massively important if you are stretched out on

ULTRA CYCLING

IT’S ABOUT IF YOU CAN HACK IT, IF YOU CAN PHYSICALLY SUFFER DAY IN, DAY OUT — MARK B EAU MONT

FACT

Jenny Graham knocked almost three weeks off Paola Gianotti's four-year-old record of 144 days

the tri bars for 16 hours a day. I’ll fell run once a week because strengthening the parts around your ankles and knees is really important and a great way to avoid injury, whereas most cyclists would never put their trainers on because they think it will hurt their speed.

I’ll do some real ‘suffer fests’, four hours on the Wattbike, but I’m not going out doing back-toback, 12-hour rides on the bike on the road. I only build that endurance in the final block of training.

The cool thing about ultra endurance is that we can all do it. It’s not a hard pace - my average speed around the world was only 15 mph.

J G I did a lot of work on my pedal stroke. I was a mountain biker and had never put that much thought into how I pedalled, but when you’re riding for that amount of time it’s really important that you’re pedalling in the most efficient way. I did some really long, boring sessions on my turbo to get my technique better.

I did some cross-training. Cycling was best but sometimes I just got sick of it so I would go hill walking, or ski-touring during the winter, basically anything aerobic and that involved going up hills.

ABOVE Hills, hills, hills: the ultimate way to build strength

SC Plan your training by time, not distance.

Also, after a big training session I would collapse on the kitchen floor because it was lino and there would be no sweat stains. Eventually, I bought a sweat mat for the living room.

J H Strength training with compound lifts, deadlifts and squats are really important. I carry a kilo and half more muscle than I would if I were just road racing, because I need that strength to withstand sitting on a bike for such a long time. I have a physio who gives me the same neck exercises used by boxers.

ON THE ROAD FACT

28-year-old James Hayden rode for Catford CC Equipe/ Banks before moving away from racing in 2015

M B When you’re road racing, you’re constantly on the power, you’re constantly turning the legs, making every mile count, whereas with ultra-endurance you’ve got to be clever, use the downhills for active recovery, relax the legs, allow your back to stretch out, use time on the bike to get a bit of a break. On climbs you never ever push the big gears. Use the terrain to your advantage and let the bike ride as efficiently as you can.

J G I would get up each day with a plan to ride a certain amount of hours. I didn’t get bogged down in how many miles that would be or places I needed to get to.

You’re more in control of the hours than the miles. Some days I could cycle 15 hours and cover 300km, but other days I could cover only half of that because I had a stonking headwind or massive climbs. If I was counting the miles I’d go to bed thinking that was a negative day, even though I’d worked really hard. I had to let go of the miles I was doing.

On the days when I was behind schedule, I knew I was in it for the long game. All you could hope for was that the next day or week you’d get a tailwind. As long as I’d done the hours, I was happy.

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SPRING

I’VE HAD 10 SNICKERS AND THREE COKES FOR MY DINNER OR MIDNIGHT SNACK

the gap until you get to a place where you can deal with the problem correctly.

AVOIDING INJURY/ILLNESS

— JAM ES HAYDE N

FACT

In 2012 Conway tried to break the round-the-world record but a driver hit him, fracturing his spine

SC Unsupported rides require a lot of imagination and improvisation. For example, I would use roadside barriers for massaging my quads at the end of the day. If I stayed in a hotel, I would wash and rinse out my clothes as best as I could and then put them back on and sleep in them so they would be dry by morning.

J H My darkest moment was in Montenegro during the 2016 Transcontinental. I arrived in a town at the bottom of a big climb at 1am and everything was closed. I hadn’t eaten and had no food. I could either stay until the morning and get some food, or carry on up this 1500m mountain.

I decided to head up and it was horrific. I was bonking and kept having to stop and take five minutes to find some energy from somewhere, then I’d carry on for another 100 metres. It went on for hours and hours but I completed it.

J B During the Race Across America my support vehicle suffered a double flat and we had only one spare wheel. I learned a valuable lesson - before you start the event, take the vehicle to a garage, let all four tyres down, and fill them full of foam and gunk and then inflate them again. That way, if you get a flat the gunk fills

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FACT

Beaumont's ultracycling career began in 2008 when he broke the round-the-world record (194 days)

M B A lot of ultra endurance is about self-awareness of your body. When you start to hurt on a bike, a novice might think they’re injured, but actually there’s a big difference between being sore and being injured. You need to learn quite quickly to identify the problem and adjust your form or your position on the bike.

It’s also amazing how aches and pains come and go if you keep riding. A lot of people who’ve never been there before give up the first time they get sore.

J G During training, I was a nightmare. The minute I saw anyone coughing or sneezing I would freak out. I would have a big scarf around me constantly to keep germs out and carried hand gels everywhere. If I caught a cold it would have such a big impact on my training. On the road itself, I washed my hands constantly. I got a 24-hour flu bug in New Zealand that completely floored me and I just had to ride through it.

SC You need to get lots of miles in the legs and concentrate on your technique so you are using the muscles and tendons in the right way. Your cleats – do you have zero degree or nine degree rotation? I needed the rotation so that if things were going wrong I could add that flexibility.

But then there are other types of injuries. You can get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in your hands,

ULTRA CYCLING body functions in a different way, so it has to be fuelled in a different way. The body’s main fuel source becomes fat instead of carbohydrates, so no gels or energy bars. The top ultra-distance riders are fat-adapted and can operate on fatbased foods for long distances.

SLEEP/RECOVERY J H How much sleep you need depends on the length of the race. If it’s only three days you could probably get away with nothing. Over the nine days of the Transcontinental I needed at least three hours a night. And I don’t sleep in a hedge. I stay in a hotel. Ninety minutes in a hotel bed is worth the same as three hours on the road. The time of checking in and out is earned back by the quality of the sleep.

J B The Race Across America lasts ten or 11 days and sleep deprivation is a major issue. You can’t overcome it, but you can manage it. If you look at the top riders who are riding at high speeds during the day, they slow down at night, and that allows your mind to change gear, it brings clarification to your head and allows you to make better decisions. Sometimes it requires you to slow down to what would be regarded as a ridiculously slow speed, but keeping moving and not stopping is the key aspect of these races.

neck spasms from drinking from your water bottle. There are ways you can learn to hold your water bottle to prevent these.

J B If you’re riding supported, who’s handing your food? If someone who hasn’t washed their hands passes you your bottle you could be out of the race within 24 hours. We had it down to a fine art during Race Across America (Barr won the 6069 age category in this year’s race). Every bottle that comes in, every bottle top is sanitised. And all bottles are replaced with new ones every 24 hours.

FACT

In an earlier life, Joe Barr was a four-time Irish cyclo-cross champion (1985, 86, 87, 91)

ABOVE Finding motivation on the long and winding road

NUTRITION SC If it’s available to buy, you eat it. You often don’t have the luxury of choice if you’re selfsupported. Subway sandwiches are very good.

Their Chicken and Bacon Ranch Melt is a foot long and is 1000 calories before you put the sauce on. You buy four of them, put three in your back pockets and eat one there, that’s 4000 calories and it’s taken you just 10 minutes - that’s where fast food is really good.

J H Food is difficult in the sense that you won’t always find what you want, but simple in the sense that there’s always something and you’ll just have to compromise. Usually the only thing available at two in the morning is a petrol station. I’ve had 10 Snickers and three Cokes for my dinner or midnight snack. Calories are king.

You don’t want some fancy salad or shake, you want big calories.

J B : In ultra-racing, the further you ride, the slower you become. When you slow down, the

FACT

Conway's other bike feats include riding from London to Paris in 24 hours – twice

MENTAL STRENGTH M B A lot of people in sport are motivated by the fact that you suffer but then it will be all over and you can have a shower and a pint and tell your friends about it. The thing about ultra endurance is you have to be motivated by what you are doing and not the idea that it will soon be over. That whole ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ thing? It doesn’t work when you’ve still got hundreds, thousands or, in my case, tens of thousands of miles to go.

In a 70-mile sportive you can bury yourself, but ultra endurance is a different mindset, you have to somehow completely get lost in what you’re doing rather than kidding yourself it’s soon going to be over, because it’s not.

SC While I’m riding I like to listen to audio books, music. I don’t want to speak to my family – only my wife as she doesn’t worry as much as my mum, dad and sister. If you’ve got the food, water, sleep and muscle management firing, often your mind is on a high anyway.

J G Big countries were hard. Coming through Europe was great because you’d get through one or two countries in a day and you can get some perspective on the miles you are doing and feel the progress, but a big country like Australia or Canada or Russia, you’re there for weeks and weeks.

I thought it was okay to be a bit sad or emotional at times. In life we spend a lot of time trying to block that out, but if you let it be we generally come out of it, especially when you’re on your bike going through some really cool places and seeing some amazing sights.

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CHAPTER 3

SUMMER You should be hitting your peak by now, but there’s still time to get there if you’re not. Get out there for big days in the saddle and take on those events you’ve always pondered entering.

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IMAGE HENRY IDDON ROAD CYCLISTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TRAINING MANUAL 83

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WORDS ROB KEMP

LEARNING FROM EVERYONE Glean wisdom, experience and the odd anecdote from those who live and breathe cycling…

For some it’s a dream vocation, for others simply a means to an end, but for all of those whose 9-to-5 is spent on or around cycles and cyclists, the knowledge learned on the job can be useful to us all.

What we can learn from…

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LEARNING FROM EVERYONE

T H E R E PA I R M A N . . .

PHIL BUR T

FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS Phil is a former Team Sky and British Cycling physiotherapist who now runs performance clinics for all riders via philburtinnovation.co.uk I worked in rugby for 15 years before becoming a cycling specialist. It prepared me for collision injuries, which I see a few of, but the most common issue riders have is around saddles – not getting a correct fit in particular, or switching to one someone else is hyping up. Even on the Tour I’ve seen riders go into a panic and change their setup at the last moment. Cyclists often do get the right saddle… but in the wrong position.

Also, warming down is something too many of us neglect – and is a cause of muscular problems, as is sleep hygiene. When I worked with Sky, the team used to have their own mattresses and sheets. It was

that important. At a recreational level, rest, recovery and enjoying a sound night’s sleep will reap rewards, too. As Sky showed, choosing a bed that you’re comfortable with is crucial to recovery and works for cyclists of all levels and experience.

Poor preparation among novice riders undertaking big rides is another issue. If you’re going to do a 100-miler, you must give your body an idea of what it’s going to feel like beforehand, so ensure you train for the duration of time you’ll spend in the saddle on the day. Hitting event distance in training also has a psychological aspect, boosting both confidence and motivation to train.

LESSON #1 SLEEP E ASY Research has shown that impaired sleep affects your cycling performance with one French study showing a 10% drop in cycling time to exhaustion after a sleep-deprived night. To remedy the situation, says acclaimed sleep expert Shona Halson, you should: consume cherry juice and tryptophan-containing foods (tryptophan’s converted to melatonin that helps you sleep) that are also high in protein like turkey and pumpkin seeds; create a low-light and cool sleep environment (around 18°C); and avoid electrical stimulants in the hour prior to sleep.

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THE COACH...

D AV E R E A DL E

POWER OF THE MIND Dave is a cycling coach who recognises the importance of psychology on performance.

He’s also a fan of sharing your progress…

Ten years ago I took up cycling to get in shape. I was 19 stone and unfit, and I went on a journey which culminated in me achieving a dream of taking part in the 2014 Commonwealth Games riding for Team GB. I learned that you have to be resilient.

As well as performing as an international cyclist, I have also worked as a GB cycling team psychologist.

I learned that as the physical impact of cycling begins, you also need to set yourself a challenge to work towards for mental motivation. Target a cycling event and draw up a plan to achieve it that’s realistic. Look at your daily schedule and ask

yourself questions like, ‘What time do I have free today?’ We’re all time-starved and over-worked but even a 15-minute highintensity turbo-trainer session will make a difference, with studies showing that such a short workout can boost aerobic capacity.

Measure your achievements beyond simply numbers on scales; instead use photos, social media blogs and performance improvement scores on Strava to show others and yourself the progress you’re making.

Also accept that, if you’re cycling to lose a few pounds, weight loss is for the long haul and you’ll have setbacks along the way.

LESSON #2 GOAL GETTING Make your goals ever-present by pinning them to the refrigerator or by your computer, and then have a quick assessment every fortnight.

Another way to keep on track is to write down the time you plan to complete a ride and an alternative time. Say you have a 60-minute indoor bike planned at 6.30 in the morning but the kids wake up screaming. Session postponed.

But if when writing down your goals you have an alternative time – say 5pm – even if it’s for only half the session length, you get in your ride.

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T H E PA R A M E D I C . . .

BEN FORDE

HIGH CADENCE PEDALLING Ben’s a Cycle Response Unit (CRU) paramedic with the London Ambulance Service I’ve been a CRU rider for a number of years and spend much of my working life on the bike.

We have a four-week rotating roster of 10-, 11- and 12-hour shifts – a typical one could be four days of starting at 7am and going through to 7pm. One of the key skills

to learn and one that I take away most for when I’m cycling for pleasure isn’t how to ride fast but how to ride very, very slowly. We have to negotiate our way through event crowds and heavily pedestrianised areas. The knack to this is riding at a high cadence, spinning the pedals but constantly feathering the rear brake so that you’re creating a resistance that allows the bike to sit up. Never stop pedalling – it’s that action that gives you the balance you need.

LEARNING FROM EVERYONE

THE CHAMPION...

TOM STANIFORD

R I D E S LO W, R A C E FA S T Tom lives with MDP syndrome and lipodystrophy, a rare metabolic disorder with fewer than 12 recorded cases worldwide

“W E W E A R F ULL K I T INCL UDING PRO T EC T I V E K E V L A R S TA B V ES T. BU T T HE K I T A ND BIK E W EIGHS A ROUND 70K G!” This high-cadence pedalling’s something I’ve taken into my climbing technique.

We wear hi-vis gear, have blue flashing lights and sirens but even that doesn’t mean everyone sees you – people often respond just as well to a shout of ‘coming through’ when you’re on a bike. We still get the odd fist shaken at us for cycling on the pavement or jumping the lights, which we’re allowed to do!

Staying hydrated’s also key to doing our job. We wear full kit, including protective Kevlar stab vest, but kit and bike weighs around 70kg.

That’s a lot of sweat!

LESSON #3 HYDRATION Research shows that a sustained state of dehydration impairs strength, power and high-intensity muscular endurance by 2%, 3% and 10%, respectively. When cycling, around 1kg fluid loss should be replaced with 1.5l of fluid, taking into account fluid lost through weeing. This should include electrolytes lost in sweat, especially sodium. As for everyday drinking, the NHS recommends 1.2l a day.

In spite of the physical implications of my condition [it’s affected Tom’s metabolism and body fat distribution, leaving him with little fat on his limbs but an accumulation of unhealthy levels of fat around his organs], I’m a National Para-Cycling Champion.

I try to get out on the road three to four times a week, with the occasional turbo session thrown in.

But due to my metabolism and horrific recovery rates, I have to be careful not to overdo the intensity or ferocity of my intervals. I seem to go better with slightly longer but less intense work, and stuff ‘at threshold’ or just above or below is good.

I use standard equipment for everything except

glasses, shoes and gloves.

I’m practically going blind so prescription Oakleys from RXsport.co.uk are essential for my enjoyment and confidence. Seeing clearly on the road is key – any rider would benefit from regular sight checks and quality cycling glasses.

My feet are picky and I’m constantly testing custom and stock shoes and insoles from Bontrager and CycleFit.co.uk. As for gloves, I have tiny hands – no Trump jokes! I fit children’s XS size. They’re great for price (no VAT on kids clothes); bad if you want a glove design that doesn’t feature either unicorns or lightning bolts.

I stretch religiously to maintain what little flexibility I have. And I am fortunate to have a wife who is a mechanic extraordinaire.

L E S S O N #4 8 0 / 2 0 R U L E You won’t go far wrong if you follow the 80:20 rule where you train easy (under 60-80% of your maximum heart rate) 80% of the time and hard just 20% (80-100% maximum heart rate) of the time.

This is the same whether you’re a recreational rider or an Olympian. Why? At the end of the day, road cycling’s an endurance sport so maximising aspects like fat-burning, as you do with long sessions at low intensity, is key. But it also demands power and speed – like when climbing a hill – hence the 20% hard.

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THE VETERAN RIDER...

ROBERT COLLIS

HOW TO RIDE SMARTER Robert, 70, has completed over 200 triathlons since 1985. Now retired, he devotes his waking hours to the bike probably have lapped myself. I tell others to go to a reputable bike shop, explain exactly what you want out of your bike and cycling, and get the correct setup. (Or buy a mountain bike and become a kid again!)

Once you start really getting into things, you can then look at the different races that are available and really challenge yourself.

I recommend keeping a diary to track your progress. And buy a GPS – it’s a real lifesaver and you can track your distances more accurately and go explore the world.

Cycling enables you to travel to different parts of the country and discover new areas.

LESSON #5 GPS BENEFITS Smartphones have GPS built in, meaning many of the features loaded into GPS cycling computers are opened up to your phone.

Simply download apps like Strava, Endomondo or MapMyRide, and you’ll have access to routes, community leaderboards and live tracking.

Many of these apps are free, though you might have to pay to unlock additional features. You’ll have to purchase a handlebar mount for on-the-fly feedback, too, and it’s worth buying a waterproof case for severe downpours like Topeak’s Ridecase (£31.99). Just remember that in GPS mode, battery life can be as short as 90 minutes so you might need a battery pack.

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T H E C H E AT. . .

DANILO DI LUCA

OVERCOMING ADVERSITY The 2007 Giro winner tested positive twice but has dug deep and put the past behind him Winning the Giro d’Italia, as an Italian rider, is the pinnacle of your career.

It’s the thing you dreamt of as a child, very few ever manage to achieve it and I’m very thankful to be one of those riders. But my two positive tests have been very difficult to deal with, especially

people dearest to me turning their backs. Yes, I made mistakes and I don’t condone anyone taking drugs to enhance performance, but it is very difficult to understand unless you were part of that era of professional cycling.

The most painful thing for me is being given a lifetime ban from the sport that has been my world since I was a very young boy, to not be able to remedy my mistakes over time and give back my experiences, good and

(Insert image for Danilo credited to Velobici)

My family and mates encouraged me to attempt triathlon over 30 years ago, and I’ve been on a journey ever since. I came from a swimming and running background so trying my first cycle ride since my paper round was a challenge!

Hence, I’d advise joining a cycling club.

You’ll find members are willing to help whatever stage you are in your cycling life. It was only after joining a club that I significantly improved my technique, especially during time-trials.

My present ride is an old-school Trek 5000. I think if this had been my steed on my first tri I’d

LEARNING FROM EVERYONE

THE CHAMPION...

DAVID LOZANO

MANAGE THE PRESSURE Spanish rider Lozano competes for the world’s first all-diabetes professional cycling team, Tean NovoNordisk. He earned his first stage victory this summer (August 2018) at the competitive Tour du Rwanda

“SOME OLD F R IENDS A BA NDON YOU A ND PRE T END LIK E YOU NE V ER E X IS T ED, WHICH IS PA INF UL T O DE A L W I T H” bad, to help make the sport better and stronger in the future. It weighs very heavily on me.

Some old friends abandon you and pretend like you never existed, which is painful to deal with, but you realise the people that you’re close to now are not there because of your achievements, but the man you are.

One of those, Chris Putnam, owns the cycling brand Velobici, and we’ve worked together to create the DL Killer collection. At the time of your lowest point it can feel like nothing else matters, but over time life moves on.

LESSON #6 SELF TALK Di Luca’s doping was a clear case of self-sabotage. Twice!

The truth is, whether it’s cycling or in life, we sabotage ourselves as much as outside forces do. One of the key sources of selfsabotage is negative self-talk. Always keep self-talk positive. So if you’re dropped from the pack, instead of “I’m screwed – this is a nightmare”, turn it around and believe that, “Anything can happen. There’s still time to reel my mates in.”

I love cycling so I feel lucky to live what I love.

Cycling is my job but, and this is no disrespect to most jobs, you can’t approach it with the same mindset as a regular vocation because it’s so hard and takes over your entire life. If you don’t enjoy it, then you’ll quickly feel the sacrifices aren’t worth it.

While cycling is an individual sport, there’s a big team around you (family, coaches, friends, teammates), so there are always a lot of eyes watching what you do, which can feel like constant pressure. This adds to the sense of

responsibility and the desire to perform immediately. This in turn can make you rush your training and try to build form too quickly, which doesn’t always work out and can actually make things worse. As recreational riders, there’s really no need to fall into this pressure trap – please retain balance.

I believe all professionals have a different perspective on this but, for me, the hardest part is being away from home. I like to suffer; I like to race; I like to train.

But it’s really hard to be competing and suffering and not being able to go home at night to the support of your family.

LESSON #7 BALANCE Cycling’s a wonderful, life-affirming activity but it’s not your job. Spend more time cuddling up to your Pinarello than your partner is a fast-track way to the divorce courts. Remember that, whatever your targets, family comes first and that your training and race schedule should revolve around them, not the other way around. That said, bring them on-board by taking them out for a ride – and leaving the Lycra at home. Also set a budget for gear. Cycling can be an expensive sport. A hole in your finances will again leave a hole in your relationship. And train smart. An indoor trainer means you can rack up miles without removing yourself from the family space.

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PACING

WORDS JAMES WIT TS IMAGES GET T Y

HARDER FASTER LONGER A profi proficient icient pacing paciing strategy will save you time and energy. Become the Ace of Pace and ensure you don’t endure a Cruel Summer…

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Above To make it round those hairpin bends you’re going to have to learn how to pace yourself

our textbook pre-sportive breakfast of porridge, toast with jam and a shot of synapse-stimulating caffeine has you lining up ready and hungry to unleash a performance that’d have Peter Sagan shaking in his Slovakian aero booties. The announcer sends you on your way, your inner chimp eaten by your inner lion as you pass packs of riders and hone in on bragging rights over your post-100-miler-pint. You. Are. A. Tiger. Or you were.

Two hours later your bonking brow’s resting on your top tube and there’s seemingly insufficient oxygen on the whole planet to revive you. Welcome to the science and art of pacing.

Pacing, in its very basic form, is the distribution of energy during a ride. Your goal is to achieve your desired outcome, whether it’s time-, speed- or distance-based, without fatigue killing your dreams. Simple. Sadly not.

The combination of terrain and fitness, not to mention

Y

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ego, means generating peak pacing performance is built up through years of experience. Or you can fast-track via the beautifully paced words that follow

Intensity matters “Core to pacing is knowing where you are in the moment,” says Daniel Healey, coach and former head of sport science of the now-disbanded Tinkoff-Saxo.

“That’s where your functional threshold power (FTP) comes in. It’s the maximum output you can hold for an hour. An hour test can be debilitating so we test riders over 20 minutes and reduce that figure by 5%.”

So if your FTP over 20 minutes is 250 watts (W), reduce that figure to 237.5W

PACING

to determine your FTP. This information is used to set training zones, designed to improve different parameters of fitness, be it speed or stamina, depending on the time of the season. But that intensity information’s also a useful pacing gauge because, like zones, pacing’s dependent on duration and effort. The problem is, despite power meters dropping in price, you’ll struggle to get change from a grand. Thankfully, these zones and pacing awareness are more accessible.

According to Professor Oliver Faude of Basel University, FTP correlates to an intensity that’s similar to your blood lactate threshold (LTHR), which you can measure via a heart rate monitor. Ride flat out for 30 minutes but, 10 minutes in, start your heart rate monitor. Find out your average heart rate for the next 20 minutes and that figure’s an approximation of your lactate threshold. “Once you have that figure, you can establish your zones and pacing guidelines,” says Healey.

You can find out more about zones online but, as a snapshot, you could ride for many hours in the energy-efficient zone (60 to 70% of max heart rate), while the red-line zone (90 to 100%) will be minutes or even seconds.

It takes years of experience to perfect your pacing performance

Know thyself

Your FTP is the maximum output you can hold for an hour

Knowing intensity and how your body responds is a great start to maximising your long rides or sportives. But unless you train solely on a turbo trainer, or ride in a vacuum, there are myriad other factors that affect your peak pacing profile, again beginning with you.

“Pacing’s influenced by your metabolic response, which varies from one rider to the next,” explains professor of sport science Louis Passfield. “A rider who racks up lots of miles will create a lean, fat-burning machine as opposed to one who focuses on high-intensity, shorter efforts that favour a carbohydrate-heavy system.”

When it comes to pacing sportives, arguably the fatburning pedaller’s in a stronger pacing position. One of the more recent theories around pacing and metabolic response is FatMax, which is the intensity at which fat oxidation peaks. The theory goes that as near endless supplies of fat provide nine calories per gram rather than just four calories per gram of carbs, which maxes out at around 300-500g glycogen a rider depending on fitness, the higher a rider’s FatMax, the more they can preserve glycogen levels for hard parts of the race and so maintain more consistent pacing. From his research, Professor Asker Jeukendrup observed that the ‘best’ FatMax zone was around 60-63% VO2 max or around 75% of maximum heart rate. For less fit individuals, this dropped to 50% VO2 max.

Increasing the proportion of good fats and fasted training are two mooted methods to raise your FatMax. Just beware of fasted training as, while it’s hit the headlines for transforming Team Ineos riders into endurance juggernauts, it can leave you feeling light-headed and mildly nauseous.

Muscle type also impacts pacing. A high prevalence of fast-twitch fibres means you can generate high but short power outputs, but punctuated by long periods of lower-pace riding. A high prevalence of slow-twitch means you’re better as a steady eddy. Crudely speaking, bulbous thighs and calves might mean fast-twitch; lean and sinewy slow-twitch.

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Climbing masterclass

Pacing templates come in various guises – some easier to follow than others

Model behaviour That’s a peek into the physiological window. But what about modelling; in other words, is there an ideal pacing template? ‘Even pacing’ would, on the face of it, seem the most e�cient. There are no spikes in power to drain your glycogen reserves or burn your muscles. The problem is, in reality it’s the hardest pacing strategy to follow, whether you’re pacing by speed or a physiological parameter (such as power output or heart rate). You see, if the course features the odd hill or two, no matter the gradient, maintaining an even speed means a power profile packed with spikes; if you’re looking to maintain an even power/ HR profile, it means variable speed.

There’s also ‘negative splitting’, where you start slow and gradually increase speed. This is a possibility on pancake-flat sportives, but on hilly events, or events where hills are skewed early or late, it’s not feasible. It’s also psychologically tricky to avoid going hard from the o�. Which brings us onto the most realistic and arguably the most e�cient pacing model: the J-pattern.

“The J-shaped strategy is pretty e�cient,” explains author of the book Cycling Science, Stephen Cheung. “You start out harder than your sustainable workload and then slow down for most of the event because of accumulated fatigue from the early e�ort. Then, when the finish line is closing in, you feel you can push hard for, say, the final quarter of the event, depending on distance.”

It’s a pacing strategy we’re all aware of and arguably comes down to motivation, which peaks at the start and finish, and then levels out when that finish line is miles away. So aim for the J-pattern but don’t neglect the minutiae…

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Put in too much power before you reach the hill and you’ll run out of puff halfway up

“We spend a lot of time with time-triallists to examine pacing,” says exercise physiologist Jamie Pringle, “and when it’s a rolling course or you have steep hills, be it a TT or road race, in most cases it’s better to push harder on the uphills and ease o� on the downhills.

It’s the same when riding with or against a sti� headwind.”

This sounds obvious but how many of you have approached a hill already blowing out of your chamois pad? The higher power output required for the hill then tips you over the edge (physiologically rather than topographically, we hope). Unless the downhill matches that between Conococha and Paramonga in Peru – reportedly 117km long, dropping from 4,095m to 16m, and all bike-worthy – you’ll not recover on the descent and kill your pacing strategy for the rest of the ride.

Cheung picks up the pacing baton and says, by way of an example, that if you’re attacking a five-minute hill and know that when you’re fresh you can hold 113% of your FTP for that period without cracking, knock o� 5-10% and hit a five-minute hill at, say, 105% of FTP during a long, fatiguing ride. Just remember

PACING Riding in a pack is a tried-andtested way to pick up your pace

that when it comes to pacing hills, the steeper they are, the more conservative you should be, partly because gravity chafes but a subsequent steep, short descent can again mean less recovery time.

Climbing and pacing is worthy of a separate article in its own right, especially when it comes to standing or sitting.

We’ve mentioned it in the past, but it’s worth reiterating that research shows that road cyclists are more efficient when remaining seated until the gradient hits 10%. Tip over to 11% and standing becomes more efficient.

It’s not just on the climbs that position influences pacing efficiency. On the flats, how you sit can save you minutes over a sportive. The exact mix of positions throughout a ride is highly individual but don’t fall into the drops trap. Unless you’re highly trained, sitting on the drops for long periods leads to back pain and inconsistent pacing; in fact, it’s been shown that even pro riders only nestle into the drops for around 25% of a multistage ride.

IMAG E RUSSELL BU RTON

Speed of the pack Like the pros, you can generate a higher, more consistent pace by riding in a pack, something known to riders since time immemorial. Back in 1979, scientists studied wind resistance and power output in racing groups, measuring a 47% energy saving when riders followed at a rather improbable 0m, but still a healthy 27% at 2m back. Even at 3m, benefits have been noted.

More recent work by Bert Blocken, Professor of Physics at Eindhoven University, showed that you can even conserve energy and maintain better pacing if it’s your turn up front. “Sitting just 1cm behind realised energy saving benefits of 2-3% for the front rider,” Blocken explains. At that distance you’re bordering on morphing into a tandem but Blocken asserts it’s not totally unrealistic. “While more akin to track riding, on the road cyclists hide behind each other in a staggered fashion, so it’s not just one long train linked by just a centimetre.

That said, a more real-world 15cm still sees a 1.5% conservation of energy.”

Or you can con yourself into riding faster. In 2011, Kevin Thompson, of the University of Canberra, asked a group of cyclists to do a 4km time-trial against an on-screen avatar that the riders thought was going at their best pace. In actual fact, it was 1% faster. Despite Thompson’s deception, the riders kept up with their virtual rival, cycling faster than they ever had before. “That showed us the body has an energy reserve of 2-5%,” Thompson says.

The method seems to work even when riders know they’re being duped. A team at the Indiana University worked with Thompson to replicate his study and, again, most riders beat their best by 2% when racing the avatar.

Then the researchers told the athletes they had been

deceived and asked them to race one more time, again at 2% faster pace than their personal best. “They still managed to beat it,” says Thompson. “They’d shifted their pacing template.”

A more proven method of raising your pacing bar, perhaps, is greater selfawareness – specifically association and dissociation. “At certain intensities, you can switch off,” says Thompson. “Then you reach a point and associate with the body. Elite athletes associate with these signals more readily and at a greater range of intensities. They’re in tune with their bodies, meaning they judge pacing better and can also live with discomfort better than recreational riders.”

Another huge part of learning pace control is practising the course you’re going to compete on. “Recreational riders can check out the course online but, when it comes to the elites, we’ll often visit the course and record key sections on a GoPro,” adds Thompson. “Then play it back again and again. Psychologically you have a more accurate pacing algorithm.”

Whatever your riding experience or level of fitness, poor pacing can result in a shameful bonk. However, a combination of training tools and greater selfawareness should set you on the fastest path for pacing perfection. Allez allez!

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E G KNOWLED Plus Can you go faster with no extra effort? Cycling headed to the Boardman Performance Centre to find out…

Think aerodynamics. Think Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling, boffins in lab coats and streams of white smoke snaking their way over the contorted body of a cyclist crouched over a £10,000 superbike in a wind tunnel.

We’re all subject to the pull of fancy components that promise to make us faster for a given amount of input. Who wouldn’t want to grab that KOM with no extra effort?

What companies don’t tell you is that your body is the least aero thing on a bike; surely, if you can adjust your position on a bike just slightly, you can generate ‘free speed’.

Working out that fine-tuned position might require a wind tunnel. From around £200 you can do just that at the Boardman Performance Centre in Evesham. This facility includes a cycling-specific wind tunnel that’s open to all, and gives you the opportunity to work on kit choice and body position, to make sure you ride as fast as the wind will allow.

The measuring devices calculate changes in drag and, with a degree of complex mathematics, can then give you an indication of how many watts, and therefore

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how much time saved, can be gained by altering position and kit on the bike.

So, with this in mind we headed to Worcestershire to work out how to ride faster, without spending loads of cash…

Find your baseline Before you can undertake any worthwhile testing, you need a baseline – what are you comparing any improvements to? Our starting point was based around someone who’s just got themselves a road bike, has little knowledge, but might be aiming to complete a 100-mile sportive in the future.

We decided that I’d jump on the bike in a very relaxed, upright position wearing ‘comfortable’ clothing. My hands were placed on the tops of the handlebars with arms relatively straight, looking ahead.

From the top down, I was wearing a regular helmet, waterproof jacket, baggy shorts and mountain bike shoes.

The wind tunnel blew a 22mph wind straight at me, and the computers worked their magic to calculate that this 100-mile sportive would take me about four hours and 40 minutes.

GO FASTER

IS POWER

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SKINNY FIT 15W COST – varies; from £70 TIME SAVED – 06:01 secs (15W)

DROP THE JACKET 16W COST £0 TIME SAVED 06:20 secs Rain jackets certainly keep you drier in the rain and warmer in the cold, but by heck they sure do billow about and slow you down.

With a non-skin tight layer on, you could easily feel – and hear – the wind tugging at the fabric, holding you back. After a bit of pedalling in the tunnel, I also warmed right up – something I’ve definitely experienced out on the open road with a jacket on.

I opened the jacket’s zip a little to let some more air in. Interestingly, this made very little difference to my

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aerodynamics (or lack of, at this point). Neither did opening the jacket fully, to let the back of it fly free in the wind, still blowing past me. In essence, the jacket – whether it was closed, half-open or fully open – was clearly not an aerodynamic piece of clothing.

Lesson one in aerodynamics: unless conditions are really bad – whereby keeping yourself dry and warm is absolutely essential – it's best to ditch the jacket and add a tight base layer instead.

Road cycling is one of the few sports where it’s definitely legit to strut your stuff in Lycra. And there’s good reason if the time I saved in my 100-mile sportive is anything to go by.

I ditched the comfortable-fit jersey and baggy shorts, leaving me in ‘proper’ roadie Lycra kit; and I swapped my MTB shoes for a pair of roadie shoes with BOA dials instead of Velcro. Even without the data this felt faster – the wind felt like it slipped over my body easier, there was less noise and less fabric flapping. Seeing a noticeable difference of over six mins was no surprise. Dare I say it, it was also comfier. Lycra officially rocks!

GO FASTER

GETTING LOW 40W

TIME TRIAL Ditch the baggy shorts, drop down on the hoods, shave your legs...

COST £0 TIME SAVED – 17:43 secs (40W) If there’s anything that proves getting aero doesn’t have to cost the earth, this is it. From the relaxed ‘I want to see the world go by’ position to an ever-so-slightly more dropped position, I cut nearly 18 minutes off my ride – that’s enough time to sink the first post-ride pint!

To slice off this time simply required placing my hands on the hoods, bending my elbows and hunkering down a little bit. This drastically reduced my frontal area, thus reducing turbulence and therefore drag. This simple shift in position saved me 40 watts and, impressively, I

could view this in real time. The wind tunnel has a small screen projected in front of the bike, showing an outline drawing of your previous and/or current position, allowing you to observe the impact of the changes, along with digital dials showing the drag you’re reducing.

There is a trade-off, of course. A more aggressive position on the bike increases the weight on your hands and so how effective this would be over a four hour-plus ride really depends on how long you can hold such a pose. Fortunately, most sportives aren’t 100 miles, straight, flat

and into a constant headwind – their variation in gradient and direction ultimately means you’re going to be moving about on the bike far more than I was in the wind tunnel.

If you’re going to spend prolonged time in a fixed position, it would be beneficial to spend some time working on your flexibility, lengthening the time you spend in an aero position each time you ride. Also look at the fit of your bike. Even raising the bars to provide a more comfortable position could end up more aero if it means you can hold a slippier position for longer.

03:55:29 This would be your new finish line

04:32:44 100 miles at 22mph average

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AEROSHELL 2W TIME SAVED – 00:58 secs (2W) COST £15 (Lazer Aeroshell)

Having eschewed baggy kit and dropped in to a more aerodynamic position, I’m dipping my toes into the shallow waters of marginal gains. The helmet I have, handily, came from a shop that also sold plastic ‘aeroshell’ fairings, which you simply clip in place. While these might not fit all helmets, there are numerous ‘aero’ lids you can buy that do the same thing – smoothing out the airflow over your head.

With nearly a minute saved I reckon some may well be tempted, but there are caveats.

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If you ride in hot weather, think about the ventilation trade-off. You might be more aerodynamic but, if you’re overheating, all that will go to waste as you wither into a heap by the side of the road. Also, our ‘head-dynamicist’ pointed out that the aspect of the helmet in relation to the wind makes a difference.

If you follow Froome’s form and stare at your power meter all day, the extra aero of certain lids can be lost – they’re designed for riders in a tucked position, looking forward along the road.

AFFORDABLE AERO

VISIT THE BOARDMAN PERFORMANCE CENTRE The Boardman Performance Centre is situated in Evesham near Birmingham. The centre has a fully stocked Boardman showroom, as well as bike-fit and physiologytesting facilities, plus the wind tunnel, all of which are open to cyclists of any level – from beginner to pro.

Wind-tunnel sessions start at £195, rising to £695 with a bike fit included.

More information can be found at: boardmanbikes.com/gb_ en/performance-centre

GO FASTER

TILY YOUR RACE PLATE 5W TIME SAVED – 02:30 secs (5W) COST – how much is your sportive?

WAX, RAZOR OR CHEMICAL BURNS? 8W COST – a few quid TIME SAVED – 04:13 secs (8W)

I’m sure many enthusiastic readers have already taken the plunge, but if not… get your legs shaved! In terms of bang per buck, I reckon the cost of some wax strips/razor/chemical hair removal gel is well worth the potential time saved.

The team at Boardman was rather interested in this test, as most cyclists passing through their doors have already stripped their legs of all hairs. With my foot in a bin, I trimmed my legs and got back in the tunnel – eight watts, if you’re interested.

This was done with regular socks on – if you’re a short-sock wearer, the gains could be even greater. Oh, and as an added bonus, your legs instantly look more muscular. Win, win!

Having done all this work to save myself time on my sportive, I instantly added a good couple of minutes fitting my race plate. You won’t be surprised to learn that adding a flat number board to the front of your bike is going to slow you down – after all, aerodynamics is all about minimising frontal area.

If the sportive rules allow it, position the plate as horizontally as possible under the bars and give it an 'aero trim' with scissors.

PULL YOUR SOCKS UP 1W TIME SAVED – 00:30 secs (1W) COST £25

Right, now we’re really in marginal-gain country. My regular cotton socks were replaced with some mid-calf Aero Socks from Rule 28 (£25). These have vertical ribbing up their length to alter the way air flows around your ankles.

WHERE DID THE TIME GO? TIME SAVED – 37:15 secs (87W) COST £110

So you want to complete a 100-mile sportive, but would like to cut how long you’ll be suffering, for as little cash as possible? Assuming you’ve got to buy some close-fitting Lycra, for a touch over £100 you can save yourself nearly 40mins in total. Not bad, I reckon. Okay, there are numerous caveats, of course – not least, this was

done in a laboratory and very much not the real world. But what this experiment does show is that there are plenty of small things out there that can have a significant impact on your sportive outcome. So, the next time you’re looking to drop some serious money on some aero kit, have a think – is it really worth it?

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THE SCIENCE AND ART OF...

Elites and amateurs might ride on different spheres but they’re linked by pain. And lots of it. But what exactly is deep pain? And how can you ride to a deeper, faster place?

WORDS JAMES WIT TS IMAGES GET T Y

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SUFFERING

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SUFFERING

yclists live with pain. If you can’t handle it, you will win nothing. The race is won by the rider who can suffer the most.” The words of Eddy Merckx when asked about the relationship between cycling and suffering. Fausto Coppi rolled out an even briefer response: “Cycling is suffering.” It begs the question: what is suffering? And if it’s such a strong identifier of road cycling, how can we dig deeper to widen our suffering bandwidth and race faster, longer, stronger?

Despite the reams of data churned out by power meters and analysed by sophisticated algorithms, we can’t objectively measure ‘suffering’. Bloodrelated metrics like lactate concentration offer a glimpse but there’s no one-size-fitsall direct link between lactate and pain (despite the ‘burn’ we often feel ascending that naughty local hill).

“That’s because pain’s subjective,” says retired Team Sky sprinter Greg Henderson.

“The good thing is that pain’s something you can’t remember – on a conscious level anyway. Which is a good thing as, if we did, we wouldn’t ride our bikes for very long.”

Arguably the closest gauge of suffering is the Borg Scale. Put simply, it matches how hard you feel you’re working with numbers six to 20. Six is the equivalent of falling asleep on a turbo trainer; 20 is balls out, eyes out, dignity out. Broadly speaking, each category multiplied by 10 equates to your approximate heart rate.

It’s why you or I ticking off five hours for RideLondon might, in our deepest moments of dread, register the same Borg Score as a rider, say, breaking the Hour Record. Which brings us onto Lotto-Soudal’s Victor Campenaerts, who recently increased Sir Bradley Wiggins’s

C

“I agree with Wiggins when he said you have the feeling your head is underwater. You can rise above the water to breathe but you’d lose, so you remain submerged” Victor Campenaerts

54.526km mark to a rather ridiculous 55.089km. No event’s so etched with pain as the ultimate race of truth.

“The first half was okay, the second much harder,” says Campenaerts, during the 2019 Giro d’Italia’s second rest day.

“You push yourself over your limits but you can fall back on all the long time trials you’ve done, all the GrandTours. The more you suffer, the more you can cope with pain. I can tolerate more pain than when I was a junior. Still, I agree with [Sir Bradley] Wiggins when he said you have the feeling your head is underwater. You can rise above the water to breathe but you’d lose, so you must remain submerged.

Not fully being able to breathe summed up the second half. It’s really a mental game.”

Nature or nurture?

Ahh, a mental game. That adds up as studies have identified athletes have a higher pain tolerance than non-athletes. But, says Dr Lex Mauger, expert on fatigue and pain tolerance at the University of Kent, the correlation doesn’t confirm causality; in other words, does training boost a rider’s pain tolerance or do people with high pain tolerances naturally gravitate to endurance sport, taking great pleasure from extreme pain?

“We’re still looking into that,” Mauger says, “but we’ve done experiments, including a 10-mile time-trial, where we considered traditional markers of endurance performance, like VO2 max and lactate threshold, and it’s clear that one of the biggest predictors of high performance is pain tolerance.”

Mauger’s also dampened pain in search of raising the bar. “There are many reports of elite and recreational cyclists taking analgesics to boost performance, so we took it into the lab. We gave trained cyclists a paracetamol to see if by reducing pain they’d lift performance. And they did, maintaining a higher power output for longer. That’s led us to where we are now, investigating the direct [or not] link between pain and fatigue.”

Research on the fatiguing effects of exercise-induced pain are scarce, especially as it requires “uncoupling the pain and exercise-intensity relationship” to pinpoint the exact mechanisms at work. “That’s why we had riders pedal at a low intensity but simulating the pain of high-intensity exercise,” Mauger explains. “Not an electric shock or heat stimulus as they’re unlike exercise pain. Instead, we injected the muscle with a hypertonic saline – salty

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water – which creates a pain that’s burning, aching, cramping, tiring, exhausting… words that people use to describe exerciseinduced pain.”

Mauger’s team discovered that despite the low-intensity work, the painful stimulus reduced performance. Fairly obvious, perhaps, but Mauger says it’s the first study to demonstrate that an increased level of pain negatively impacts performance. “Now we need to establish why. We’re currently looking at the neurophysiological mechanisms via techniques called ‘peripheral electrical stimulation’ and ‘trans-cranial magnetic stimulation’ to artificially stimulate the nerve to force a muscle to contract. By doing that during cycling, we can pin down where the impediment to contraction is occurring.

Brain, spinal or muscular level?”

your core temperature rising to dangerous levels. Noakes’ model ties in with Campenaerts’ comments that constant experience of pain raises this central governor template as the body realises the threat’s not fatal.

Then there’s the more recent work of Professor Samuele Marcora. Marcora had a group of athletes complete a time-toexhaustion test. At an average power of 242 watts, which corresponded to 80 per cent of their peak power, the subjects lasted for around 10 minutes until they were fully exhausted. As soon as they stopped, within four seconds they were asked to see how much power they could generate in a five second burst of pedalling. Despite previously saying they were incapable of generating another pedal stroke, they averaged 732 watts. It wasn’t that the muscles were incapable of riding, explains Marcora, but the perception of effort that mattered. “And how much they’re willing to suffer boils down to motivation,” Marcora says.

It’s that motivation, adds Greg Henderson, that meant he remained in the saddle despite often experiencing this unholy trinity during the final week of Tour mountain stages – namely dehydration, sickness and cramps. “It was miserable,” he recalls. “But I didn’t stop. You’d have to peel me from my bike before I’d stop at the Tour de France.”

Mind over matter The experiments are ongoing and are a further step removed from historic thinking about limiters of cycling performance, which focused on factors like glycogen depletion or an increase in lactate concentration. Over the past 20 years, however, we’ve come to realise that, to a greater extent than imagined, those limits are determined by the brain.

In the late 1990s, South African Tim Noakes suggested that the brain holds the brake levers of a subconscious safety mechanism that kicks in to prevent serious damage to vital organs. This selfpreservation mechanism, known as the ‘central governor’, seemed to explain why athletes running on hot days tended to start slower than they would on cool days. If the subconscious brain perceives a threat to the body’s homeostasis, it reduces muscle recruitment and slows you down to prevent

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Top right Former Team Sky and Lotto-Soudal rider Greg Henderson admits you’d have had to peel him off the bike at the Tour de France Below Competitive social platforms like Zwift help you to dig that bit deeper

Motivation of a new challenge Like pain, what motivates in cycling is clearly subjective, whether it’s time-, speed- or distance-based. And with respect to ultra-endurance cyclist Mark Beaumont, it’s all three. In September 2017, the now 36-year-old smashed the record for cycling around the world, completing 18,000 miles in 78 days, 14 hours and 40 minutes.

“In the past I’d also ridden the length of the Americas, the length of Africa… My shortest record is 6,000 miles,” Beaumont says. “It’s why that 2017 expedition motivated. It must be scary, into the unknown, if you’re to really suffer. You can’t suffer to the same extent if you’re aiming for the same time or ticking off the same challenge.”

Beaumont has visited dark places very few have inhabited, certainly in cycling, but says putting the blinkers on and rationalising the suffering helps. He calls it the psychological arc. “Whether it’s 50 miles, 100 miles or what I do, the psychological arc is the same, it’s just mine is larger. You start fresh, dig deep and, at the end, go, ‘Thank God, I couldn’t carry on.’

“When I finished on day 78 and woke on day 79, you couldn’t have paid me enough money to get back on my bike. I was broken.

But what was different to any day before where I’d got on my bike at 4am every

SUFFERING

morning and ridden for 16 hours? Nothing had changed... it was just over.”

Beaumont’s mind suffered for as long as motivation remained high. With task completed, the mental walls came tumbling down. But, continues Beaumont, it’s not purely a psychological construct; it’s more psychobiological, which links to Professor Marcora’s work – that your mindset and motivation impacts your biological profile, making you better or worse prepared to achieve your goals.

“Every morning we took saliva swabs and examined my immunology. No one ever had to wake me up at 3.30am as I’d set myself up for that task. But I always struggled the most for the first two or three days of each bike leg; I struggled to focus as I hadn’t fully honed in on the next target.

Those days, my cortisol levels were low [signifying extreme fatigue]. Once honed in, they rose again. For me, the mind and body are inseparable.”

Beaumont also cites an ability to manage his emotions and focus on the job at hand as key to digging deep and achieving his impressive goals. He always rode for 16 hours in four-hour chunks and never worried about daily mileage – some days he ticked off 200 miles, some days 280, all depending on terrain and weather. “But it averaged around 240 miles, which

is what I needed.” Suffering, of course, isn’t something to be taken lightly. Beaumont carried on despite fracturing an elbow and breaking several teeth on day nine. Some experts have recently suggested that the cause of Tom Simpson’s tragic death on Ventoux in 1967 could have been amphetamines overriding his central governor, meaning he pedalled beyond his natural limits.

Pain relief Thankfully, there are proven, safer methods to ride hard. “Self-talk is one I used and most professionals still use,” says Henderson.

“Things like, ‘You’ve done this before’ or ‘Find your group, safety in numbers.’ Also, anything I did on the ergometer induced pain. High intensity is key to boosting physiological and psychological resilience, but comes with a lot of suffering.”

It’s why a social online platform like Zwift has its benefits. Not only are the sessions heavily aimed at high-intensity efforts, but there’s the competitive aspect, too. Then again, you could argue that by removing many mentally challenging aspects of cycling (handling, traffic, bad weather) while physical resilience goes up, mental resilience goes down.

Thinking about thinking’s also shown to manage suffering and improve

“Elite athletes are in tune with their thoughts and mental processes and that’s important to their pacing and effort perception. This ties in with techniques like visualisation, relaxation, mindfulness...”

Dr Noel Brick

performance. “We call it meta-cognition,” explains Dr Noel Brick, lecturer in sport and exercise physiology at Ulster University.

“Elite athletes are in tune with their thoughts and mental processes, and that’s important to their pacing and effort perception. This ties in with techniques like visualisation, relaxation, mindfulness.

Simple things like focusing on your cadence, focusing on your technique. And this ties in with Noakes and Marcora’s work where effort perception is key to pacing strategy, so if you can think strategically, like riding hard for efforts where you know there’s a lower-intensity stretch after, that’s the ideal.”

There is, however, a body-audit balance.

“Our research has shown that too much self-monitoring leads to an increase in effort perception and a reduction in movement economy,” adds Brick. “There’s research to show that focusing too much on breathing patterns, for instance, affects movement economy. Yes, you should periodically monitor how you’re feeling but don’t overdo it.”

And then there’s arguably the unnatural: transcranial direct stimulation (tCDS). This is where you slip into a cap of electrodes or, in the case of the Halo Sport device, a headset akin to conventional headphones, where a weak direct current is delivered for a period of minutes to induce changes in both sides of the motor cortex. “One of the effects is to reduce pain,” says Mauger. “It’s commonly used in a clinical setting, especially in the US, and we’ve tried it in a sporting setting to see if it confers an advantage. The study’s ongoing but the results are equivocal at this stage.”

Henderson’s also used Halo to promising effect. “I’ve used it during the first hour of my training on the ergo and found I had a nice bump in my VO2 max intervals. Whether this was placebo or not I was happy because I believe placebo is as good as any performance enhancer.”

Then again, we’ve spoken to experts in the field who say it’s more appropriate to improve learning skills rather than raising pain threshold.

Cycling has a special relationship with suffering, whether it’s the pros ascending their fourth category-one climb of the day or you and your mates panting up the local 1-in-4. Science says we all possess the reserves to dig that bit deeper, to ride that bit faster. But all we ask is one thing: do it quietly. The Rules and the embarrassing number five, ‘Harden the fuck up’, has arguably fetishised the idea of suffering.

More acceptable? The stiff-upper lip version: ‘I’m just about to undertake five 20-second sprints in a bid to raise my internal central-governor while, ultimately, reducing the perception of pain in my motor cortex.’

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CHAPTER 4

AUTUMN Warm autumn days can give some of the most pleasurable riding of the year. There’s also plenty of late season sportives to keep your motivation up and stretch out your summer fitness.

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WORDS: PAUL ROBSON

10 STEPS TO HILL CLIMB HEAVEN Whether you’re planning to hit a traditional end of season hill climb race, or just want to smash your mates’ times on the local Strava KOM, we asked the experts of the one-off climb for their advice on getting from the bottom of a hill to the top as quickly as possible

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OUR EXPERTS

HILL CLIMBING

Jack Pullar – National Hill Climb Champion 2012 James Gullen – National Hill Climb runner-up 2013 Rob Gough – Catford Hill Climb winner 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Peter Giddings – Rob Gough’s coach, honed-coaching.com

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TRAINING TIPS “Preparing for hill climbs is about learning to squeeze every last bit of speed from whatever fitness you have built up over the summer,” explains Honed Coaching’s Peter Giddings. “In the few weeks until the uphill-only season starts you can’t get dramatically fitter but you can definitely train yourself to make full use of what you have already. Happily, that process needs only one or two really high quality sessions per week with shorter endurance miles taking up the rest of your weekly riding. When you do the hill climb sessions train at 100 per cent and then relax and enjoy your riding the rest of the week.

Do the sessions in tips 1 and 2 once a week until the final week before your target race and you’ll see your climbing pace ramp up faster than the most infamous hill climb course.”

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TRAIN YOUR POWER To build the explosive speed that separates graceful grimpeurs from the straining masses you’ll need to strengthen your climbing muscles and build your capacity to exercise well above your sustainable pace

Just one of these sessions per week, after a rest day and at a time when you won’t need a clear head for a few hours will work wonders for your hill climbing strength. You’ll really benefit from a good 30- to 45-minute warm-down on flat roads after this, so even though your legs will be screaming don’t just wobble straight home – if it is good enough for Thibaut Pinot, it’s good enough for you.

A good progressive warmup is a must for this session and if there are any hints of a strain or any kind of injury leave

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it for another day. Aim to arrive, warmed up and ready to climb, at the base of a quiet 5-10 per cent hill that will take more than three minutes to climb.

Shift into the big ring and select the third smallest sprocket (training for hill climbs isn’t easy) and as you reach the first ramp of the climb attack as if your maillot jaune depended on it. Aim to accelerate as fast as possible and maintain your 100 per cent effort for 30 seconds without shifting.

Stay in the same gear and sit down to continue climbing as fast as you can until you are unable

to push your cadence above 60rpm any longer. The gradient, gearing and oxygen debt will be biting by now but fighting the urge to ease off and getting all your effort out will pay you back in spades come race day.

As soon as you’ve ground almost to a standstill, shift into an easy gear, breathe deeply and keep pedalling. You have six minutes to regain your composure, recover and get ready to hit the hill once more.

These efforts are very tough, but keep attacking every one until you can’t maintain 60rpm

past one minute; don’t reduce the gearing, and don’t ‘pace yourself’ on the sprint starts.

You know you’re working at the right level if you can only manage three to six full-on efforts of at most three minutes each. If you’re outside this range, then your gradient, gearing and/or commitment need some adjustment.

After a flat and gentle 30to 45-minute warm-down ride, make sure you ride easy for a couple of days, at least, until the rigours of this session have soaked in.

Peter Giddings

HILL CLIMBING

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LOSE WEIGHT

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PACE YOUR RACE

Power to weight is the most important aspect of climbing any kind of hill, from short sprint hills to long mountain passes.

This is the ratio of a rider’s power measured in watts divided by the combined weight of their body and bicycle.

The higher the end value the faster you will fight gravity uphill.

I have found the easiest way to improve this is to lower the weight of the bike – by using expensive lightweight parts and removing unnecessary things such as bottle cages, chain catchers and Garmins, I managed to get my hill climb bike

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down to 5.6kg for the nationals.

It’s also worth noting that rotational weight counts more than any other part so light wheels – in particular reduced rim weight – will help massively.

You can also try to improve your power with a specific training programme but the best way is a combination of increasing power, reducing bicycle weight and a sensible diet to shed any unwanted pounds. This must be controlled, however, as riders tend to start losing power once they reach a certain weight, which won’t improve your power-to-weight ratio.

James Gullen

UP YOUR CADENCE To complement the firepower that your big gear session will develop you’ll need to raise the cadence you can efficiently ride at when climbing. Power = force x speed, so finding an efficient and rapid pedalling technique is vital

As part of a medium length endurance ride head out to the hill you’ll race on, or one that is as similar as possible to the gradients you’ll face. Just before you hit the hill shift into the easiest gear you have and start to raise your cadence.

Aim to ride the climb with the highest cadence possible. Every climber has a different style that feels easiest and most efficient, just look at any mountain pass for the evidence, so use these efforts to experiment with your technique and body position to find what makes the most of your body’s natural strengths.

Focus on remaining relaxed in the upper

body, breathing deeply and finding the technique that helps you pedal faster with the least effort – you’ll find muscles you didn’t know you had.

Ride your target hill six times in succession with a short recovery period equal to the length of your climbing effort between each climb.

For the first, third and fifth repeat stay seated and then complement that with riding the second, fourth and final effort standing on the pedals.

Once you’ve completed your efforts head off to finish your endurance ride and begin recovery for the next session. Peter Giddings

This is where most people tend to go wrong in a longer hill climb – they’ve done all the training, lost weight and bought the lightest bike possible but still set off like a bat out of hell for a climb of sevenplus minutes. Longer climbs, like last year’s nationals on the Stang in Yorkshire, are too long to rely on anaerobic efforts and fast twitch muscle fibres and require more of a controlled effort.

The difficulty is finding a compromise between going off too hard and blowing up and going off too easy and losing

time. I’ve found that time trialling has helped with this, making me start in a much more controlled way.

The first few minutes are easy to overcook as you are fresh and full of adrenaline. Proper pacing should mean the first one to two minutes feel easy – don’t go looking for the pain, let it come to you. More time can be gained with a strong finish on a long climb than can be lost by fading halfway.

Power meters are useful for this and if you have one set yourself a target power and stick to it – this means that you never go too far into the red. James Gullen

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6

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

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MEASURE YOUR EFFORT

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DEAL WITH THE PRESSURE

My three key tips to riding one hill really well are that you need to go into it fresh, you need to get your gearing right and you need to know how to judge your effort. The final two points depend entirely on the hill, so you need to get to know it before you

At some point you’re going to have to go eyeballs out, and for short, power climbs it’s vital to look at the hill and judge where to use the effort. I know when I won the national hill climb

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GIVE YOUR ALL

9

MIX IT UP

It’s not easy to wring every ounce of energy out of yourself when your body is screaming at you to ease off. You have to judge where to put maximum effort in, but if you’re giving everything your body will be in agony

Depending on the rider’s style and the gradient people ride either standing or seated. Standing allows you to accelerate harder but uses more energy with upperbody work and is also less aerodynamic.

I would tend to try to stay seated unless the gradient ramped up so steeply that standing is necessary to keep the pace up – often anything over eight per cent.

Seated hill climbing allows you to get into a rhythm and save the standing muscles

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before the finish line. Knowing you have more to give, and digging it out of yourself, is crucial. I probably tried harder than most at the 2012 Nationals because I didn’t see anyone else throwing up into a bucket after the finish!

Jack Pullar

for when they’re really needed on steeper gradients.

Mixing standing and seated climbing can help with pacing on the climb – it is faster spending more energy going harder and more into the red on steeper sections that would normally drag the average speed down. This means you can then grab some rest on a shallower part where your speed is still reasonable. This, of course, has to be a compromise and not too hard or too easy.

James Gullen

One thing that I’ve learned the hard way is that it is a good idea to run lower tyre pressures on wet days and steep roads. It has cost me races in the past, and since learning I’ve had mine down as low as 60psi for the famously steep Catford race.

Rolling resistance is negligible at

race on it. At the very least recce the climb the morning of the race, but ideally check it out much earlier and practise on it if at all possible.

All these aspects improve with experience though, so the chances are that if you think about climbing a specific hill faster, then you probably will. Jack Pullar

title in 2012, I didn’t even notice the first half of the Ramsbottom Rake course as I was so focused on powering up the early bit. The steep top section seemed to go on forever – and I really paid for the speed I had at the bottom. Jack Pullar

the speeds you’ll be doing up a steep climb, but the energy you’re wasting if you’re struggling for traction and your tyres aren’t in proper contact with the road is huge. Anyone who has got out of the saddle on a steep climb on a wet, mucky day will know the feeling of losing traction and momentum, so do what you wcan to avoid it. Rob Gough

HILL CLIMBING It’s not easy to wring every ounce of energy out of yourself when your body is screaming at you to ease off

SO YOU WANT TO RACE A HILL CLIMB

10 BREAK IT DOWN Here’s a final tip from us: it is a good idea to break your climb down into smaller segments.

This is especially true of long climbs, but can also be useful on shorter, sharper ascents, where the worst sections of gradient will actually make up only a small part of the climb.

When you recce the hill you will be racing on, pay attention to how the gradient varies between the bottom and the top and plan your attack. It can pay to give it

your all on the steepest sections of the climb, where you know others will struggle, and then have a micro-recovery on a flatter section where you can maintain a higher pace even as your level of effort eases slightly.

On longer climbs it can be good to break it down into bite-size chunks just for the psychological boost of ticking them off as you go. Make sure you leave enough to change up near the top and sprint for the line!

The iconic Catford CC Hill Climb is known as the oldest bike race in the world, and attracts large crowds, but there are hundreds of other uphill time trials taking place across the UK throughout September and October.

These races are the traditional way to end to the British cycling season, and so while they are hard work they are also often a lot of fun. Unlike in a bunch race, each rider sets off individually and is timed over the length of the climb, with the aim being simply to get from the bottom to the top as quickly as you can. For details of your local hill climbs, and how to enter, visit the Cycling Time Trials website at www.ctt.org.uk

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WORDS NICK COOK IMAGES CAREL DU PLESSIS/ XTERR A

SMASH THE TRAILS Fitness gains. Technique improvements. And a bucketload of fun. Swapping the turbo for the trails this winter will have a wealth of benefits.

Here’s Nik Cook with his ultimate guide to off-road adventures

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TRAIL TRAINING

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s the days get shorter and the weather deteriorates, it can be tempting to toil on the turbo and hunker down in the gym. Yet, if you opt for an indoor winter, you’ll miss out on a whole world of dirty fun and training gains that off-road cycling can offer and with such varied and challenging terrain you can’t fail to improve your technical skill level too.

Mud, gravel and snow all make forward progress more difficult and so will challenge your body in a way that tarmac never can. Cyclo-cross, cross-country and all kinds of mountain bike events take place throughout autumn and winter so you can get a regular competitive fix. There’s no doubt that you’ll always push that bit harder when you pin a number on.

Hitting the trails will result in you being a far stronger and more balanced rider come springtime, ahead of the UK sportive season. When you do get back on the road, you’ll feel as if you’re flying.

Finally, don’t underestimate the mental boost that hitting the trails will give you.

You’ll get away from the stress of traffic, reconnect with nature and it’ll definitely be more interesting than staring at a wall or an avatar on a screen. There’s also a genuine sense and thrill of adventure in heading off-road and a wonderful childish joy of getting covered in mud. Time, then, for our essential ways to conquer the trails this winter.

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NIK SAYS RELAX!

RACE CYCLO-CROSS

It’s easier said than done, but try to stay relaxed and don’t overreact to the bike moving under you. Any tension in your body will transmit to the bike and result in twitchy and unpredictable handling. If you do find yourself tensing up or have a moment then stop, take a few breaths and calm down before heading off again.

Cyclo-cross is also one of the most accessible forms of cycle sport. Throughout the autumn and winter, it’s probably taking place in a park near you and is known for its inclusive and welcoming attitude. It’ll give you a brilliant 30-45min workout, fasttrack improving your bike-handling skills and, at most local events, you can enter on the day and give it a go on a mountain bike or gravel bike.

LOOK WHERE YOU WANT TO GO… …or more importantly, don’t look where you don’t want to go. So avoid looking at that big intimidating log or rock, as you’re guaranteed to hit it if you do.

Look well ahead down the trail and focus on the line you want to take. Even on non-technical trails, look ahead to scope out smoother and faster lines.

DOWNHILL DEMANDS When the trail tips downhill, following the previous tips of staying relaxed and looking ahead is even more important.

As it gets steeper, you’ll need to move your weight back but don’t go too far or you’ll lose control and traction on the front wheel. A dropper seatpost can be a game changer and makes positioning far easier. Feather your brakes to control your speed but avoid excessive or sudden use of the front brake. On gravel and cyclo-cross bikes, the best and most stable hand position for descending is down on your drops.

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THE KEY TO CLIMBING Off-road climbing is all about the judicious application of power to maintain momentum and traction; you can’t just muscle up out of the saddle like you would on the road. Anticipate the gear you’ll need at the foot of the climb. It needs to be easy enough so that you can keep spinning your pedals and accelerate to overcome obstacles or lift the front wheel. Keep your pedal stroke smooth and even to maximise traction. Stay relaxed, dynamically shifting your bodyweight and moving in and out of the saddle as required. If you’re struggling to keep your front wheel down, move on to the nose of the saddle and drop your chest towards your bars.

FIND A TRAIL CENTRE The dedicated trail centres around the UK are brilliant places to ride, yet trail grading can be confusing and inconsistent. A red route in North Wales, for example, is likely

STEP-BY-STEP: MTB CORNERING Approach the corner with your outside foot leading and try to get all of your braking done before you enter the corner and shift to the gear you’ll want to use to exit it.

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Think of your upper body as a horseshoe and, as you turn into the corner, adapt your horseshoe to gain grip by straightening your inside arm and pointing your outside elbow high into the air. This tilts your bike while your upper body and head remain relatively upright.

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Gain even more traction by pushing down through your outside pedal. This also prevents your inside pedal catching as you tilt your bike and, on tight turns, can allow you to use your inside foot as an outrigger.

TRAIL TRAINING RELISH THE GRIND One of the main joys of riding off-road is that you’ll work on all aspects of your cycling fitness without having to stick to structured workouts. But if you want to add some structure, high gear/low cadence work is particularly suited. Find a gravelly climb that takes about five minutes and climb it seated in a gear that just allows you to maintain 50-60RPM. Use the roll downhill to recover and repeat five times.

GO FOR GRAVEL If you have an itch for a new two-wheeled purchase, satisfy it with a gravel bike. It’ll expand your riding options, and allow you to explore those byways and bridleways you never dare tackle on your road bike, while still being far from a chore to ride on the road compared to a mountain bike. You can also press it into cyclo-cross and/or winter road training duties.

to be a very different proposition to one in Norfolk. For an indication of what to expect, look at the local topography, ride the blue route as a sighter and, if there is one, have a play on the Skills Loop to see what sort of level of technicality to expect.

TRY TUBELESS For all off-road riding, tubeless is a no-brainer and the set-up hassle is far outweighed by the performance gains and reduced puncture incidence. You can run lower pressures, which massively improves grip, but with no tubes there’s no risk of impact flats. Small punctures will seal without you even realising and, if you do get a bigger tear, there are a number of easy repair options or you can just bung a tube in.

NOCTURNAL THRILLS If you think daytime off-road riding is fun, try heading out after dark. Tame trails in the day take on a whole new dimension and the thrill factor is massively increased. Opt for a wide flood on your bars and a helmet-mounted spotlight to light up where you’re looking. Don’t forget a rear red light if there are any road sections on your route.

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FOCUSED USED

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FOCUSED SKILLS

WORDS ROB SPEDDING IMAGES STEVE BEHR

SKILLS After a chastening cyclo-cross experience, Rob from Cycling Plus asked a former world champion for advice... and got more than he bargained for

R ob, I think it would be most sensible for you to put these on.” I’ve just returned from the changing room in my Cycling Plus Lycra when Mike Kluge presents me with a set of mountain-biking arm and knee pads.

Photographer Steve Behr is smiling conspiratorially. I’m confused.

The three of us are at Redbridge Cycling Centre – or Hog Hill as it’s also known – on the north-east edge of London for, what I at least thought

was going to be, a reasonably chilledout, low-risk, Sunday morning of cyclo-cross tuition. Mike, the founder of Focus bikes and a former CX world champion, seems to have other ideas.

And, judging by the look on his face, Steve is complicit. Reluctantly I pull on the knee and elbow pads and we wheel our bikes out onto the circuit.

Needless padding?

This is the first time Mike and I have met, so I don’t think he’s making me dress up like an off-duty Iron Man because he’s heard that my one and only foray into cyclo-cross was, well, disappointing. It came in autumn 2017 and I finished second to last and the only thing that got hurt was my pride.

So, why am I padded up? “It’s like a second brake system, so that you don’t stop with your knees and

elbows,” laughs Mike. “Seriously, though, wearing pads helps you find the limits of your bike and tyres.”

Basically, Mike’s saying that if you’re experimenting, wear protection. Go past the limits of bike, tyres and, let’s face it, talent and you hit the ground. Complementing your helmet with knee and elbow pads means that you’re more likely to be able, and willing, to get back on your bike and go again. “Also, it means that you won’t be stuck to your sheets when you get up for the toilet in the night…”

Mike even suggests that riders new to road riding should think about investing in pads. “For sure, people might smile at you,” he says, “but it can boost your confidence and, if you do fall, you won’t have to spend time away from your new hobby.”

If you’re experimenting, wear protection. go past the limits of bike, tyres and, let’s face it, talent and you hit the ground ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL 121

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Left Did we chop Mike out of the main image? You decide…

Fight club It doesn’t take long for me to appreciate the extra padding. As we spin along Redbridge’s asphalt track for what I assume will be a gentle warm-up, Mike calls me over to ride by his side. The wisdom he’s looking to impart is, surprisingly, aggressively delivered. “Get closer. No closer. No, even closer. Right, now lean against me and try to push me over…”

Okaaay… Next thing Mike and I are barging shoulders, clashing elbows and leaning our bikes in like Cavendish and Sagan at the end of a sprint. Needless to say, Mike’s an expert and has little trouble sending me veering off my line. It’s fun but I’m not 100 per cent sure what it’s

If you find yourself heading over the bars, just relax and release the front brake 122 ROAD CYCLIST’S TRAINING MANUAL

FOCUSED SKILLS

Right Editor Rob, under Mike’s guidance, hones his cornering skills

achieving. “In a race there can be lot of contact,” he explains, “so learning how to stay on your bike, hold your position and not crash is vital. Also, this is a good way of reassuring yourself that bikes, tyres and riders can cope with a lot of rough treatment.”

He’s right. Maybe it was the crash pads, but at no point during the argybargy session did I think the bike was going to slide from under me. It’s not something to try with an unsuspecting riding buddy or someone you’re passing on your commute, though…

Endo the world as I know it…

Straight after the rough and tumble I discover why Mike and Steve had been sniggering earlier. As Steve lines up a shot, Mike grabs the back of my

saddle. “Okay, I’ve got you so clip both feet in and grab your front brake hard.” I do as I’m told and all of sudden Mike hoists up the back of the bike. I find myself nose down and screaming just a little bit. “Now, let go of the brake.” I do, Mike lets go of the saddle and the rear of the Mares clunks back to earth. Once I stop crying Mike explains, “If you lock your front wheel and the bike tips forwards, you have more time than you think to prevent a crash.”

The point Mike’s making is that if you find yourself heading over the bars because you’ve locked up, the best thing you can do to avoid arriving at the scene of the accident is, actually, to relax and release the front brake. If you haven’t flipped too far forward and you’ve still got weight

over the rear, the bike and gravity can still save you. “Don’t panic, release your brakes and you might save your arse,” says Mike. I’ll try and remember this nugget of advice the next time I’m heading for a broken collarbone…

Brake the habit Of course, not sending yourself arseover-tit in the first place is probably the best form of injury prevention so brushing up on your braking technique is a great idea. “The best way to stop quickly is to keep in contact with the saddle,” says Mike.

“Place as much of your bodyweight as possible on the last quarter of your saddle and stretch your arms so that you’re sitting as far back as possible.”

This is so that both wheels stay in contact with the ground for as long as

CROSSING THE ROAD We realise that not all of you will be rushing out to race cyclo-cross, but much of what Mike tried to teach me is valid on the road, too…

Better braking Being able to stop quickly and safely is an essential skill on British roads, so taking time to finesse, or simply refresh, your

braking technique in a safe, traffic-free environment is something we should all do from time to time. A bit like re-reading The Highway Code…

Finding limits We don’t necessarily advocate all-in-bike wrestling, but

finding a safe way to discover the limits of your bike – and your skills – isn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon. It’s surprising just how far you can push a couple of skinny tyres by whizzing around in circles.

Stunts aren’t silly Skills like bunny

hopping aren’t just for racers or kids in BMX parks.

Like improving your braking technique, learning to skip over obstacles without falling off your bike can come in incredibly useful. Even if it’s just so that you can leap onto a kerb if required at a pinch point…

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rear wheel lightens and can, in theory, slide gracefully, speedway-style as you turn. Selecting a bigger gear lets you hold speed through the corner and accelerate out of it.

And the listening? “If you hear that the tyres are starting to tear out the grass, then you need to become a little more sensitive as you’re at the limit of grip.” It’s a dizzying, and surprisingly tiring, exercise but if you can find a flat expanse of grass it’s a lot of fun. Oh, and make sure that you don’t just go in one direction. As Mike says we all have a “Schokoladenseite”… a chocolate, or favourite, side where we’ll find it that bit easier.

“key is getting on and off the bike while losing as little speed as possible,” shouts mike

possible to help you control your emergency stop.

My main learning from stopping practice is the importance of the front brake. As you slow quickly, your weight naturally moves forward no matter how hard you try and keep your butt clamped to the saddle – to the point that it can quickly end up doing 100% of the retardation – so getting used to trusting my front brake has made a big difference to my stopping confidence. And, of course, I now know, theoretically at least, what to do if the front brake works too well…

Above Mounting at speed’s needed in the pacechanging world of CX

Ever-decreasing circles Once I’ve got better at stopping, Mike decides it’s time to improve my cornering. In a typical cyclo-cross race, says Mike, you need to nail the tight turns without sacrificing speed.

We head onto the grass and Mike starts whizzing around in tighter and tighter circles, at extreme lean angles and with his inside pedal virtually clipping the ground. I try to follow but struggle to match Mike’s compact rotations. “Push your weight onto the handlebar, choose a bigger gear and listen to the grass!”

By loading up the bar, you’re doing the opposite of the braking drill – the

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Right Bunny hopping’s a key CX skill

Here’s hopping To navigate small obstacles on a CX course, or out on the road, the bunny hop is an essential skill. I have to admit at being the master of the lazy bunny hop – basically pulling the bike into the air using my clipped-in feet.

This isn’t how you’re supposed to do it and the occasions where one, or both,

of my cleats have unclipped show why.

“It’s quite simple to learn if you start slowly,” says Mike. Drill one sees us riding along and repeatedly popping small wheelies; drill two standing up and shifting our weight forward to lift the back wheel; and drill three combining the actions as we clear a log placed on the road.

Jeopardy increases slightly with the addition of small cones under the log and an increase in pace. I fault a couple of times but come away happier with my hopping skills.

On and off switch…

“The key is getting on and off the bike while losing as little speed as possible,” shouts Mike as he manages to dismount and ‘resaddle’ his moving Mares in what seems to be a blink of an eye. In a cyclo-cross race – or upon arrival at the station – being able to gracefully and quickly leap from your moving bike is a key skill. And it’s one that I feel the pads could come in useful for when I try it.

As Mike explains the dismount technique I’m certain I’ll end up on the ground, twisted among the spokes. “At the last moment, as you approach an obstacle swing one leg behind the saddle,” he says. “You keep the foot you usually unclip first

FOCUSED SKILLS

on the pedal and swing the other leg between the frame and that leg. Then put your foot down close to the front wheel, take your other foot out of the pedal and run!” Easy, right? Actually, it’s not as hard as it sounds, especially if you do it in slow motion at first and cheat a little by unclipping your ‘pedalling’ foot before starting the dismount.

Getting back on is an art as well.

“Get it wrong and it can be painful,” laughs Mike. “You don’t want to land on what in German we call the sacknut!” Quite. So, he says, the secret is to run, jump and rather than land, erm, plumb in the centre of the saddle, aim to contact the saddle thigh first. And use the swing of the leg to get you back on the bike without hopping along on your trailing leg. The knee and elbow pads are no use and I wish I’d worn a cricket box as it takes several attempts before finding success.

After a few attempts, though, I was managing to, if not seamlessly, at least gracelessly get off and on in one movement.

It turns out that there’s more than one way to pick up and run with a focus mares ’cross bike Above Whatever your ability, CX is simply great fun

Shouldering the burden

The last move Mike wanted to show me was shouldering the bike. In theory, this is the easiest skill – just pick it up and put in on your shoulder, surely? It turns out that there’s more than one way to pick up and run with a Mares… The simplest method is to grab the bike by the top tube, hoist it onto your shoulder, wrap your arm around the head tube and grip the bar close to your chest. Mike, though, prefers to lift the bike by the downtube and onto his shoulder in one move. He then places his arm under the downtube and reaches around to grab the bar. Finally, he explains that you can simply slam on the front brake so that the bike flips forwards and you slide your shoulder through the frame.

Apparently this is useful when you’re tired…

REDBRIDGE CYCLING CENTRE Thanks to Redbridge Cycling Centre for their hospitality. This purposebuilt facility in Hainault, Essex, is a brilliant place for cyclists of all levels.

It has a road circuit, a mountain-bike loop and a BMX track with a selection of hire bikes available for use if you don’t have your own. For more information visit www. redbridgecyclingcentre.co.uk

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WORDS LORNA CHAPMAN IMAGES TOM SIMPSON

STRETCHING THE LIMITS It might look intimidating from the outside, but used properly yoga can help even the creakiest MAMIL get the most out of their cycling, so get to grips with our beginner’s guide

Y

ou’ve heard of yoga, you’ve heard that top pro cyclists use it and, if you’ve ever had a bike fit, you’ll know what an important role flexibility and symmetry play on your bike. You’ll have an even better idea if you remain hunched over for 10 minutes after a long ride.

But when touching your toes seems an unachievable dream, and sitting down cross-legged a distant memory from primary school, then contorting yourself into the

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sorts of poses typically seen in yoga manuals is highly unappealing and more likely to do harm than good.

But inflexibility is not inevitable, and yoga is a progressive exercise so there’s no need to throw yourself in at the deep end anyway. Even some gentle stretching will get you started, but then there are many more benefits to yoga than just flexibility.

Abandon your turbo for one evening a week and seek out a yoga class, or follow this guide at home, and by spring you

will return to a cycling world full of new possibilities.

As well as making you more flexible, yoga can benefit the cyclist in many more ways, promoting joint mobility, core strength, tension release, efficient breathing and mental focus.

Regular yoga can also help shield you from cycling-related injuries, as it makes you aware of which areas of your body are tight, weak or out of balance, and it can help make your joints stronger and more flexible.

STRETCHING

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GETTING STARTED? Use the guidelines below to build a home practice routine, but if you’re completely new to yoga, try a local yoga class and explain your goals to the teacher. You could even book one-to-one sessions so that the lessons are more specific to your needs. In a class, expect to do seated or lying breathing exercises, posture work and to finish with a well-earned lying relaxation.

BAD BREATH Are you, like many cyclists, only aware of your breath when you’re panting up a hill? Controlling your breath as you ride can be valuable to your performance. Tune into your breath and breathe more slowly and deeply instead of instinctively taking fast gulps of air into the lungs on climbs and sprints. Focusing on your breath during a ride can help keep your mind calm and tuned to your end goal. This also helps keep your upper body relaxed and increases the volume of breath going into your lungs.

1. DEEP ABDOMINAL BREATHING Lie on your back with your knees bent and place one hand on your chest and one on your stomach. As you breathe deeply, do both hands move, or just one? Does one or other predominate? You’re aiming to achieve diaphragmatic or deep abdominal breathing, so that just the hand on the belly moves up as you inhale and down as you exhale. Breathe through your nose as much as possible as the nasal hairs help to filter out impurities in the air before it reaches the lungs.

Tip Relax the belly as the air enters the body and draw the belly towards the spine as you exhale, lifting the pelvic floor and perineum at the end of the exhalation to help strengthen the core at the same time.

2. ON YER BIKE! Once you’ve mastered this lying down, try doing it as you go about your day and, finally, apply to your riding. As you breathe, focus on releasing your shoulders, arms and hands. Also use the breath to avoid bringing unnecessary tension into the hands and jaw: do not waste energy by gripping the handlebar and clenching your jaw with determination as you aim for that finish line!

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BEND SO YOU DON’T BREAK Here are a couple of the many yoga poses and exercises that help keep your muscles long and injury-free. Adaptations are given, but it is important to avoid any poses that cause pain. Notice that we use the breath as a way of entering, exiting and deepening postures.

SUN SALUTATION This is an excellent sequence to loosen up joints and muscles throughout the body in preparation for a long ride, as a warm-up at the beginning of a yoga class, or simply as an energising start to your day. This is a standard version of the sequence, but you may come across one of its many variations in classes.

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Stand with your feet together, or slightly apart and parallel, and press your hands together at your heart centre. Root your feet evenly into the floor and lengthen through your spine, keeping your belly drawn in and your pelvic floor and perineum area lifted. Lift your kneecaps to engage the quads.

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Inhale and raise the arms above your head, looking up, and arch backwards slightly if this is comfortable. Lift from the middle of the upper back, curving the spine the opposite way to when you’re riding.

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Exhaling, bend forwards from the hips, keeping the knees lifted and the belly in. If the backs of your legs scream, bend your knees so that you can place the hands flat on the floor.

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Inhale and step your right foot back into a lunge.

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Step your left foot back to come into the plank, holding your breath. If this is too much for your wrists or shoulders, place both knees on the floor.

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Exhale the body to the floor, touching simultaneously with your knees, chest and chin.

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Inhale into the cobra, a gentle backbend, elbows kept in and shoulders down.

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Exhale and lift hips into the downward dog, easing the heels towards the floor.

Do not expect the heels to come down!

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Inhaling, step the right foot forwards into a lunge.

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Exhaling, step the left foot towards the hands to come into a forward fold, bending the legs if necessary.

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Inhaling, lift to standing, sweeping the arms out and up.

You can bend your knees to support your lower back and hamstrings.

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Exhale the hands down into Namaste, the prayer position.

Repeat, this time leading with the left leg to complete one round. Start with three rounds and build up to 12.

Tips Try holding some poses to stretch out problem areas before moving onto the next pose.

Holding the lunge is particularly useful for cyclists, as it provides a chance to work the front of the hip, which classically tightens when you’re riding the bike. Try taking a few breaths in the downward dog for the first couple of rounds.

The dog elongates and aligns the spine, stretches the back of the legs and relieves lower back tension. In the dog, if your weight is mainly on your hands, bend the knees to take the weight back.

STRETCHING CAT-COW Come to all fours, bringing your hands under your shoulders and your knees under your hips. Exhaling, round your back towards the ceiling, look towards your belly and tuck your tailbone in.

Inhaling, lower the belly towards the floor, bring your chest forwards and up. Repeat 10-15 times.

TOP TIP Work slowly from the tailbone towards the top of the head

Watch point Lower-back issues; inhale to a table-top flat position.

BEND IT LIKE PECKHAM

Benefits Loosens the back muscles before cycling and other activities, and helps you get used to moving with the breath.

With special thanks to Yogarise Peckham, the coolest addition to Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s yoga scene and expert Yogi Davin Jones (pictured) for showing us the ropes. www.yogarisepeckham.com

HOLD THAT POSE The poses here will help you to open out the body to counter-pose your hunched-over cycling position, and to stretch out classically tight areas such as legs, hips, shoulders and glutes. Deepen the poses with every exhalation: as you let go of the breath, let go of tension in the body.

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TRIANGLE

Step your feet wide, turn your right foot out 90 degrees and your left foot in 45 degrees.

Extend sideways taking your right hand down your right leg without leaning forwards. Straighten your left arm up towards the ceiling and look up. Hold for five to 10 breaths.

Benefits Opens hips, chest and shoulders; stretches inner thighs, ankles; extends spine.

Watch points Neck issues: look forwards, not up; lower back/SI (sacroiliac) joint problems: keep your feet parallel.

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REVOLVED TRIANGLE

Step your feet wide, turn your right foot out 90 degrees and your left foot in 45 degrees.

Exhaling, turn to the right,squaring your hips to the front of the mat.

Lengthen your torso over the right leg and reach the left hand to the floor, a block or chair. Reach your right hand upwards.

Look towards the floor, then look upwards if you can manage it without toppling over!

Benefits Stretches legs, especially the outer thigh and iliotibial band.

Stretches hips and spine, releases back tension, opens chest to improve breathing, improves balance.

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ITB STRETCH

Place your right leg on a table or chair.

Place a strap onto the ball of your right foot, lifting the toes. Keep both legs straight.

Twist the upper body to the right and lean forwards until you feel a stretch.

Benefits Stretches the length of the outer leg from hip to ankle.

Tip For a deeper stretch into the outer shin, turn foot inwards from ankle, keeping your toes lifted.

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COBBLER

Sit on the floor or a block, bend your knees and bring the feet together and as close to your body as possible, allowing the knees to relax towards the floor. Keep your shoulders relaxed and the back of your neck long.

Tip Add gentle pressure with elbows or hands for a deeper stretch.

Benefits Opens hips, inner thighs.

Watch points Knee pain: move feet away to widen the angle of bend on the knees.

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PIGEON A

From all fours, slide your right knee towards your right hand and bring your right foot towards your left hand, sliding left leg back and lower your body to the floor.

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PIGEON B

From pigeon A, raise your torso and take your left foot in your left hand for a quad stretch.

Tip To intensify the stretch, move your front foot forwards with your hips level.

Benefits A Your inner and outer hips and thighs, glutes. B: front of hip, quads. Watch points Avoid if you have knee, ankle or sacroiliac problems.

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HALF SPINAL TWIST

Sit with your legs outstretched, bend your right leg and place your foot flat on the floor the other side of your left thigh. Exhaling, turn towards your right leg.

If possible, take your left arm to the outside of your thigh. Keep your shoulders relaxed and your spine long. Focus on lengthening your spine as you inhale and on twisting as you exhale.

Hold for five to 15 breaths.

Benefits Releases spinal erector muscles,stretches shoulders, hip and neck, helps to relieve fatigue.

Watch points If you have back problems, proceed with care.

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CORE BELIEF Cyclists need a strong core for optimum performance on the bike, but you don’t build core strength while in the saddle. A strong core helps stabilise the hips and prevent see-sawing while cycling. Working the core involves strengthening the back muscles and the abs for a balanced workout and injury prevention. Done correctly, a great many yoga postures engage the core, although these exercises focus more specifically on the core muscles. Remember with these that you’re working your core, not your jaw, so keep your face and shoulders relaxed.

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BOAT A

Sit with your knees bent up, lengthen your spine, engage your abdominals and lift your legs so that the shins are parallel to the floor. Extend your arms in front of you at shoulder height. Keep your shoulders and face relaxed. Hold for as long as possible, starting with a count of 10.

(Boat B) Repeat as above but with straight legs.

Tip Lift the breastbone to avoid any sagging in the torso.

YOGA AND CYCLING FAQS the only one. Plus, yoga is noncompetitive and is about focusing on yourself, not on what the person on the next mat is up to.

into unfamiliar positions, different to those it’s used to on the bike. Simply come out of the pose and wait until it has passed.

SHOULD I PRACTISE PREOR POST-RIDE? Both! Before a ride, opt for dynamic exercises such as the cat-cow and sun salutations to loosen the body and to take the joints through a wider range of movement than they get when you’re riding.

• Post-ride, hold poses for longer and breathe into each one to deepen it.

• Remember to practise abdominal breathing and relax your upper body as you ride.

DO I NEED ANY SPECIAL GEAR FOR YOGA? A non-stick yoga mat is very useful, but your teacher may lend you one in classes. You also may opt to buy a block or a strap, although a tie or dressing gown belt are good substitutes.

ARE THERE ANY SPECIFIC YOGA FOR CYCLISTS CLASSES AVAILABLE? In large cities, these may be available, but a general class with a good teacher can be excellent too.

Contact me for information about my Yoga for Cyclists workshops planned for next year by visiting my website at… www.lunayoga winchester.co.uk.

I CAN’T TOUCH MY TOES! WON’T EVERYONE LAUGH AT ME? Absolutely not! You probably won’t be

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PLANK

A core exercise we all know and love.

From all fours, bring your elbows beneath your shoulders and place your hands together. Step your feet back and lower your hips until your legs and body form a straight line. Hold for as long as you can, working up from 20 seconds.

Tip Keep your hands in a prayer position, rather than clasping them, to avoid bringing unnecessary tension to the hands.

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SIDE PLANKS

Roll to one side, bring your elbow under your shoulder and lift your body off the floor, to rest on one foot and one arm.

Tip Lift your hips higher to challenge yourself.

Benefits Strengthens your abdominal and oblique muscles.

Watch points Elbow or shoulder pain.

RELAXATION

WHEN SHOULD I PRACTISE YOGA? Try to go to a weekly class, then complement this with a home practice as often as you can.

I GET CRAMP DURING YOGA, IS THIS NORMAL? Yes. It’s your body reacting to being put

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Finish your practice by lying on your back for a few minutes with your legs extended up a wall. Allow the body to open out completely with the palms of the hands facing upwards. Observe the natural pattern of your breathing. Be aware of any tension in the body and try to let it go.

This should bring calm to the mind and body and allow everything that you’ve done to be absorbed into your system. You should feel both relaxed and revived after this practice.

Final Say Don’t expect yoga to be easy, but do expect to notice benefits, not just to your cycling, but to your everyday life. If yoga works for Sir Bradley Wiggins, then it can work for you too.

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LOCUST

Lie prone with your hands by your sides, palms up.

Raise your torso and legs, avoid bending the knees.

Tip Clasp your hands behind your back as an alternative.

Benefits Strengthens back muscles and glutes. Stretches chest and abdominals.

Watch points Neck problems: keep head in neutral and look at floor. Avoid with serious back injuries.