Quantifiable Training

I don’t know much about cycling, apart from Cadel Evens winning the Tour de France, and I did race BMX a bit when I was a kid. But, for the most part, when it comes to training for mountain bike racing. I am not your man. 

However, I do have a client who races at club level. The style of racing she is involved in, is off road endurance based, most races last around 90-120 minutes. Naturally a high volume of training is required. So I started researching pacing, and pumping and all kinds of sexual connotations found in cycling training. I then started asking about her training, she told me of some pretty big obstacles in the way, such as work and other commitments. We then further discussed the ‘style’ of the coming races, two, are technically challenging, while two, require more all round conditioning and less technical skill.

 I then asked the said client to show me her training logs, to which she replied “I don’t keep training logs, I just go on what feels like it is working”

‘Feels like’ is not exactly a quantifiable term. How does she know what is working and what are her key performance indicators, heart rate? Watts output? 5’km times? What? Furthermore, cyclist rely heavily on periodization of training, so how does she gauge her current performance on this time last year, or the last time the current block of training was in place?  And finally, If she has 5 blocks of training per week, how many and what sessions is she going to change week to week, to cater for the next races specific details? 

The 6th hot chick on this blog

So, overall, her training is made entirely of guess work with no real direction or goal, she can’t produce her training results to a coach or mentor and she can’t quantifiably identify weak points in her game. 

When I spoke to Australia’s strongest man Derek Boyer, he explained to me that he limits his training to 6 hours per week. This is even more important in an endurance based sport. Where, every minute of training should have value.

 Personally, I have tried many different ways to log my own training, and have found the most effective is the ol-skool diary, I log each set and what phase of training I am in. This is the simplest filing system I have found and gives clear structure to my training.

The point I am trying to get across here is, plan ahead, log your entire training, make it quantifiable and set key performance indicators. Give yourself clear goals that are based on results not ‘feels like’ fiction. Map your progress and watch your performance output improve.