Getting Faster...

[snorkel sucker]

Herman Toothrot said:

They are the same.

However I'd say road is 'harder' if you really want to split them, if you are pushing yourself - on a road bike you can do constant max effort until you break. On a mountain bike it's almost impossible to be constantly smashing the pedals, the technical nature of it will often require freewheeling. Look at DH racing, races have been won when people have broken their chain out of the gate.

Heart rates not a good indicator, sometimes when I look at my heart rate data the peak I haven't been pedling I've been on a fast technical off road downhill and the adrenaline has raised it not my effort.

I know if I want to get fitter and faster I get the road bike out.

I'm not sure I could think of a worse way to try and explain that road biking is harder than mountain biking.

You should drop a line to Aaron Gwin - I am sure he would be stoked, as they say, to know that he wastes so much of his off season training when he could just win a race without pedaling.

Je-sus. What a thread this has turned into! You might want to look into why your heart rate spikes on a technical off road downhill. It's almost certainly not just down to adrenaline.

[Herman Toothrot]

If you put Gwin on a watt bike in a gym next to Frome on a watt bike in a gym and said go for it, who can average the most power for an hour, Gwin wouldn't even be in contention. You you need to be fit, but you don't need to be able to power the pedals to win at DH. Gwin himself has demonstrated that.


http://www.bikemag.com/videos/aaron-gwins-chainles...

[tjdixon911]

Getting back on track - I purchased a Turbo Trainer at the weekend, its all set up in the utility room ready for my first session tonight, will see how it goes...

Went out last night and I felt really slow, I think some of that was down to eating too much too close to the start of the ride and also I had a bad(ish) crash on my bike at the weekend and I was still suffering slightly from that...

I'm hoping this training malarkey will work... Working on the basis I ride on a Tuesday night and Saturday most weeks, how should my weekly plan look?

I'm thinking a plan along the lines of the below (subject to SWMBO);

Monday - Rest
Tuesday - Ride
Wednesday - Training (light)
Thursday - Training (hard)
Friday - Rest
Saturday - Ride
Sunday - Training (hard)

As the days draw out the plan will change as I hopefully commute a couple of days but this should get me going, is it too much?

[wemorgan]

tjdixon911 said:

is it too much?

Only you can be the judge of that.
If you want to add a bit of 'science' you can measure your heart rate variability each morning - this gives a metric to your body's ability to train.
Some athletes just measure their resting heart rate and look for +/- 5-10bpm differences.

[anonymous-user]

https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/knowledge/traini...

Have a look at these training plans as they will give you a good indication as to how structured your hard sessions should be.

The more I learn, the more I appreciate that when you're riding what you thought was an improvised hard session, is in all likelihood, a wasted session.

There's no point making up a training plan, there's loads available online from good sources.

[tjdixon911]

budgie smuggler said:

I've been doing this and this whenever I have a spare 30 minutes.

I find it easier to beast myself on a trainer than out on the bike as I'm always worried I'll have trouble getting home afterwards!

I gave the first one a go last night, it was a good session and I pretty much kept up with it all - the 30 minutes went quite quickly - I have no means of measuring RPM although did 30second count during the rests to work out where I was roughly and wasn't far off the 80 RPM - I purchased a wired computer (£3.50) just to have some stats at the end of the session not sure it worked too well though....