Hunter Allen, Author at Shop Peaks Coaching Group

Investment Advice for Cyclists and Triathletes!

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Hunter Allen

First you start out “wide-eyed and bushy tailed”, excited for everything and everyone related to cycling. It’s a great time when you are absorbing as much knowledge as you can, getting stronger, ripping through every cycling magazine and website memorizing all the names of the riders, and generally throwing yourself into the sport. After this phase wears off, you continue to learn, but in a way that makes you wiser now, the “wise” phase. You are learning from your mistakes made in training, mistakes in races and as you learn, you become more successful. This second step is an important one because it causes an upward spiral of success, happiness and adds to the whole “fun quotient” of cycling in general. At the start of the next phase, the “serious” phase, you are still improving but at a slower rate now. You are continuing to get wiser and ride smarter saving precious energy to keep those legs fresh for the end of the ride. This phase lasts a disproportionately long period of time because the gains are slower, the desire is still high and you are now trying harder than ever. Eventually though, you reach a place when you are not able to improve and you begin to stagnate. This next phase or evolution of training is one in which you begin thinking about all the smaller ways you can improve and that idea of “the accretion of incremental marginal gains” begins to run through your mind. Can I buy a little faster wheels? Can I train a little smarter? Do I get a coach? Maybe if I used my Power meter more effectively? This phase is what I call the “Dedicated” phase. You are dedicated to your hobby, sport and for some of you, your profession. It could move onto the next phase, which is called the “monk” phase, where you do nothing but ride bicycles and eat special food, do special training, etc. and this is the phase that all pro cyclists much reach to pass into the professional ranks. There are other phases after this of course, but for this article we are going to focus on the “Dedicated” phase. Going through to the next phase is not something that is a discrete, door opening experience, and it’s generally a slow change over time from one way of being/thinking to another.

In this “Dedicated” phase of cycling, this idea of smaller improvements dominant the thinking and actions. Improving your nutrition and its corollary, losing weight, always seems to be close to the top. From there we move onto harder training and smarter training, generally in that order because you first train harder and then you get smarter, learning that harder training only works at the right times. The next step is you begin learning about the power of the mind, positive self-talk and improving your mental game. There are many more steps that you take in this “Dedicated” phase but let’s focus on the “smarter training” one in this article.

Smarter training does not mean less training and it does not mean more training. Smarter training means training more efficiently. It means training the correct physiological energy systems at the time they need to be trained and for the right amount of time so that they give you the greatest adaptation/improvement. Training smarter does not always mean training only when you get the highest benefit for cost, as many of the strategies of training require a large investment with a small return. It is often the case, that the smallest of improvements are the improvements that make the difference between winning and getting dropped, and those smallest of small improvements take a large investment of time and hard work.

Smart Training Investment #1

Each week, you should do a workout that I affectionately call, “Intervals to Exhaustion” (ITE). ITE intervals are the epitome of effectively using your power meter for smart training. Pick an energy system you want to train on that day, and then train it until you can train it no more. ITE is based on your average watts from the third interval and typically you will stop the interval session when your power drops off about 5-12% (depending on the length of the interval) from the average watts in that third interval. See Table 1 for a guideline on when to stop doing intervals. Check out Dr. Coggan’s and my book, “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” for a more in depth discussion on ITE. To increase your fitness, you have to push yourself a little farther than before in your interval repeat sessions. If you normally do five intervals, then using the ITE concept can help give you the confidence you need to keep doing more intervals until they aren’t being effective anymore. Who knows? Should you do six repeats? Ten repeats? Four? With a power meter and using this concept, you can easily determine the exact optimal number of repeats needed for maximum training adaptation and time efficiency. Smart training.

Smart Training Investment #2

Cut out the “Fluff” in your workouts and in your week. When you are focused on training hard and really going for it that week or workout, then cut down the warm-up time, time between intervals sets (not intervals, but sets of intervals) and get rid of the endurance paced riding. The workout becomes shorter, more focused and efficient. Here’s an example of a workout with the “fluff” and then without the “fluff”.

Threshold power and Anaerobic Attacks:

WU: (warm-up) 15 minute- endurance pace and do 4 x1 minute fast pedaling intervals –cadence over 120rpm. Rest for 1 minute between each.

Then MS: (main set) 4 x 10minutes at 200-210 watts, 100- 105% of FTP. Nail these and do your best. Rest for 5 minutes between each.

Do these at a faster than normal cadence- by 5 rpm! So, legs should be burning a bit just from the spinning faster. Then 20 minutes at endurance pace- 150-180 watts.

Then do 10 x 1 minutes all out- Attack these like you are in a race and you are attacking to get away! Do your best to average 150% of your FTP for the minute- 300watts or greater.

Hammer and push it with 3 minute between each.

CD (cool-down) Head home 20 minutes.

Total time: 2 hours 43 minutes.

Now, the same workout without the Fluff.

Threshold power and Anaerobic Attacks:

WU: (warm-up) 10 minute- endurance pace and do 4 x1 minute fast pedaling intervals –cadence over 120rpm. Rest for 1 minute between each.

Then MS: (main set) 4 x 10minutes at 200-210 watts, 100- 105% of FTP. Nail these and do your best. Rest for 3 minutes between each.

Do these at a faster than normal cadence- by 5 rpm! So, legs should be burning a bit just from the spinning faster.

Then do 10 x 1 minutes all out- Attack these like you are in a race and you are attacking to get away! Do your best to average 150% of your FTP for the minute- 300watts or greater.

Hammer and push it with 2 minute between each.

CD (cool-down) Head home 10 minutes.

Total time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

That’s a time savings of 57 minutes!

Smart Training Investment #3

Forget the easy days. You are on a time schedule and have no time for ‘putting’ around spinning the legs in active recovery. This is a waste of your time. Instead of doing easy rides, just sleep or rest, do a yoga class or get a massage. Forget the easy days as they are not really helping you to improve your fitness and while active recovery does have some benefits in helping you to recover more quickly for the next workout, you need to just fully rest one day a week and do nothing. That is a more effective use of your limited time, plus it allows you to catch up around the house on those things that need to be done.

Smart Training Investment #4

Learn how to analyze the periodic charts in TrainingPeaks WKO software. The periodic charts are the charts that allow you to see your changes in fitness over a time period. These include the Mean Maximal Power Chart (Figure 1), the Performance Manager Chart (Figure 2) and the Training Stress Score by week (Figure 3) charts. The Mean Maximal Power chart graphs your ‘bests’ or ‘peaks’ for whichever time period you decide to plot. This defaults at 5 seconds (Neuromuscular Power), 1 minute(Anaerobic Capacity), 5 minutes(Vo2 Max), 20 minutes(close proxy of functional threshold power), so that these default time periods will easily tell the user which energy system is on the upswing and which is on the downswing and this will help the user to make the correct decision on current training to impact future fitness. The Performance Manager chart teaches you the dose and response relationship between work and fitness, by clearly quantifying the level of your accumulated training stress and showing you the best wattages you produce as a result of that training stress. The peak wattages always trail training stress, since it’s the training stress that causes adaptation and improvement. The Performance Manager is one of the most useful charts that a smart ‘trainer’ should invest in understanding. The Training Stress Score chart is an important chart as well and something that you should look at on a regular basis to get a clear understanding of how many TSS per week you can handle, what your rest weeks look like and what are the maximum TSS points you can score in a week. While this is not earth shattering in terms of analysis, it does give you perspective and sometimes having perspective makes you smarter and wiser.

The different phases that we go through in cycling are always interesting, exciting and motivating. We learn something at each phase and those key understandings are what allow us to move to the next phase in our cycling experience. Evolution in your cycling is like how training itself has evolved. It’s grown over the years, adapted, improved, and grown some more. I would argue this is the hallmark of success and those that are not able to follow this path, are destined to mediocrity and stagnation. Push yourself in your adventure, open your mind to new ideas and use the most advanced tools to improve. Remember that if you do five smaller ‘things’ to help you improve for next season, they will add up to one BIG thing and that contributes to the next level.

The 5 second test!- By Hunter Allen

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Hunter Allen

How to test your neuromuscular power with your power meter.

You have read about the 1-minute test, the 20 minute test and now here’s the shortest test you can do in cycling! Woo hoo! For all those that do not like testing, there is always the 5 second test! I can promise you it is over fast!

What is the purpose of the 5-second test? It’s to measure your neuromuscular power, or how quickly you can contract and relax your muscles with maximum force. In cycling, this is your sprint power. How many maximum watts can you produce for 5-seconds.

Why 5-seconds? Our power meters measure in 1-second samples, but we do not know where exactly in the pedal stroke the sample starts and where it stops, so you might crack out 1534 watts for 1-second in one test, but never be able to repeat that same power. The earth, the moon, the stars all aligned perfectly in that 1 sample to give you a high maximum wattage, but it’s not a true measure as it measured just the perfect slice of your pedal stroke. When we measure over 5-seconds, you are guaranteed to include at least 5 complete pedal strokes of both legs, and this average for the 5-seconds is more representative of your actual neuromuscular power.

Do we actually test for only 5 seconds? No, you guessed correctly, you are going to have to test a little longer. You will do at least a 12-second sprint and out of that 12-second sprint, you will take the best 5-seconds average power as your neuromuscular power. You need to test a little longer, as sometimes it takes 2-3 pedal strokes to get up to speed and jumping on the gear. Do not worry about hitting the “lap” button on your bike computer, for this test, you will have to rely on your post ride data analysis in order to see your best 5 seconds.

How do you test? You should test in both the small chain ring and in the big chain ring. Each sprint starts from a slow speed and for the small chainring, you should start from less than 8mph, so that you can really stomp on the pedals and create the most torque(force) that you can. You will likely shift a couple of gears during the small ring test, but do not shift too early, be sure to shift after you reach 110+ rpm and then shift one gear harder to maintain your pedaling momentum. You should do at least (3) of these small chain ring sprints to ensure that you capture your best 5 seconds. Some riders have more “explosivity” and they will create their highest watts in the small chain ring sprint. Other riders will need to sprint in the big chain ring to create their highest 5-second average power. For this test, you should start around 12-15mph and in a gear that allows you to really stomp on the pedals and then change to the next gear quickly. You will want to sprint for at least 12 seconds, as you might create the highest wattages from second 7 to 12. Do (3) of the big chain ring sprints as well, so that you will ensure you capture the highest wattage. For rest between sprints, it is important to pedal easily at 80-90rpm for 5minutes between EACH sprint. This allows the muscles to recover and helps you to reproduce another great sprint. Many times, your third sprint will end up being your best, so give each sprint your 100% effort and adequate recovery.

Here is an example of a good 5-second sprint. In your downloaded power file, you are looking for a sharp (straight vertical line) increase in power indicating you started quickly and hard enough.

What do you do with this data? Well, this helps you to understand if you are a sprinter or not and put your neuromuscular into a relationship with the other energy systems. Is this one your strengths? Or an area you need to improve? The old adage is true, “Sprinters are born and not made”, so your neuromuscular ability come from your genetics. Of course, you can always improve, but if you can only do 900 watts in your sprint and your competitor does 1400watts, it’s highly doubtful that you’ll ever be able to bridge that gap. Which means you should be careful where you put time into your training. Someone that is not a great sprinter might ought to focus more on improving their FTP, so they can just ride away from all the sprinters!

The 1 Minute Test. – How you should do it.

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Hunter Allen

By: Hunter Allen

The FTP test has been written about by hundreds of coaches, journalists, and others since Dr. Coggan and I created the FTP testing protocol back in 2003. It has been a constant source of amusement and bewilderment over the years to see it misinterpreted, misconstrued and wrong in many articles. Other articles have gotten the concept correctly, which is a relief. If you have questions on how to properly execute the FTP test, then grab a copy of our book, “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” where we detail the exact protocol.

But, this article isn’t about FTP. It’s about the 1 minute test, which is also often done wrong, done incorrectly or not done at all. The 1 minute test is a test of your anaerobic capacity (AC) , or your ability to do hard, hard work without using oxygen. These are very short efforts by nature and range from 30 seconds out to 2minutes.

Riders with a strong AC can attack very hard up a short hill, or attack with 1km to go in a race, or are good at doing hard, short efforts and recovering quickly. Riders that do not have this ability are generally better at aerobic efforts like steady-state riding for a long time, like doing a time trial, triathlon and climbing. There are riders that have both a strong AC and aerobic ability and these riders are a threat to win nearly any race. These are the riders winning the very hard one day classic races and also the grand tours. It is rare when you see a pure steady state rider win a stage in the Tour unless it’s a mountain top finish and the rider can just grind the legs off the other riders slowly and painfully.

What about you? Where is your AC as it relates to the rest of your energy systems? Is it one of your strengths? Or is it one of your weaknesses that you could improve? Knowing how much power you can put out for 1 minute will help to you to determine which races or events might be best for you, understanding when you should attack and put your rivals in a bit of difficulty. Understanding your 1 minute power can also help you to determine your freshness or fatigue. Your AC is highly dependent on your current level of fatigue. If you are really fresh, then your AC will be very high and your average watts for that 1 minute will also be high. Conversely, if you are fatigued at the end of a hard 3 week block of training, your AC will be low and your 1 minute power will be low. Knowing this, it is obvious when you should test your AC to achieve the highest power output…..at the end of a rest week, when you are very rested. If you took your rest even further (haha!) and sat on the couch for a month not riding at all, then went out and did a 1 minute test, it most likely would be your highest 1 minute ever. It would hurt bad and you might puke, but it would be the highest average watts for a minute.

How to properly test your one minute.

Since freshness is critical for your best 1 minute test then, you test it the first thing in your ride. It’s not necessary to warm-up very much and certainly don’t do any intervals before your 1 minute. If possible, you should do your test on a tough hill, with about a 5-9% gradient. If it’s too steep, you’ll have a hard time turning the pedals over in the last 15 seconds, so the ideal hill actually flattens out a little bit right at the top. I really like to find a hill where you do crest the top of it just after you finish the 1 minute, so it’s easier to recover after. If you do not have a hill to attack, then do the test going into the wind, so you have more resistance to push against. Before you go out to test, you will also need to adjust your “fields” in your computer head unit so that you can see: Lap Time, 3 second Power, and cadence. You will touch the “lap” button on your computer when you begin the test and then again when you stop, so that you can learn your average right at the finish of the test and also easily find it in the downloaded data. AND, it’s super important that you can see your lap time, because at 37 seconds, you will swear that you had to have ridden for a minute already. If you can’t see that timer, you will stop early and then will have to wait till the next rest week before doing it again.

Here is the exact testing protocol that you should use to crack out your best 1 minute.

Warm-up: 20 minutes of easy riding at endurance pace so that you end up close the base of your testing hill or area. If it takes 1 hour of riding to get to your testing hill or area, I would encourage you to drive and park, so that you have only about 20-30minutes of riding to do before the test. Just an hour of riding could impact your wattage average. This should be no more than 70% of your threshold power (FTP) . Keep cadence between 85-95 and the pressure on the pedals light. Now, do (3) x 1 minute fast pedaling drills, where you keep the wattage at 70% of FTP or lower, and just increase your cadence to 110-120rpm for a minute and then ride at 80 rpm for a minute. It is VERY IMPORTANT your watts stay below 70% of FTP. This is about spinning the legs, and keeping the watts low. Do NOT blow your 1 minute test by putting out too much power here.

Main Set: Now, you are ready for the 1 minute test. But, guess what??? The test is actually going to be 1 minute and 5 seconds! Yes, you will need to test for 1 minute 5 seconds, so that you capture your very best 1 minute. When you start, you aren’t able to touch the “lap” button on your computer head unit and accelerate out of the saddle at the same time, so by doing the test for 1 minute 5 seconds, you’ll be able capture the very best 1 minute of wattage output.

When you start, most likely you will be in your big chain ring (I recommend it). Jump out of the saddle hard and sprint for 15 seconds, then back in the saddle and hammer for another 15-20seconds giving it your best. It is VERY critical that you go ALL-OUT for the first 30-40 seconds of the test and then just die a thousand deaths in the last 20 seconds. The last 20 seconds should feel like it is taking 5 minutes and you are pedaling in squares and barely moving. I promise, you won’t be going that slow and your watts will still be pretty high. To produce the highest average wattage for 1 minute though, you need to absolutely KILL IT in the first 30-40 seconds. There is no holding back. There is no thinking that you’ll go harder in the last 10 seconds. You are going to be blown no matter what and the majority of your anaerobic capacity system is used in the first 30 seconds, so it’s better to completely exhaust that AC system with a max effort right in the beginning.

After your 1 minute, continue for the rest of your workout. This is probably a good day to also do the other durations in the “Power Profiling tests”: 5 second sprint, 5minute Vo2 Max and 20 minute FTP test. To learn the exact protocol for these, grab a copy of my and Dr. Coggan’s book, “Training and Racing with a Power Meter”. Today is a great day to do some testing and training and as Dr. Coggan says, “Training is testing and testing is training”. Or, you might want to do a long ride with sweet spot work, or even just some great FTP intervals in the next hour of the ride. The main thing is that you got in the correct testing of your Anaerobic Capacity and now you will know how this relates to the rest of your physiology.

Let’s examine two different tests where the first athlete did not test correctly and then the second one did. (In both figures, the yellow line is the power output). Our first athlete does the one minute test, but does NOT go hard enough in the first 30 seconds. You can tell this because the last 30 seconds of the effort is a “flat” line. This means that this rider had enough energy left to produce the same power for the last 30seconds, whereas their power should be degrading throughout the last 30 seconds. See figure 1 below.

For the second rider, this rider does the test properly, with a hard sprint out of the saddle. Notice how this rider’s power peaks and then begins falling off immediately. It continually drops off to nearly the end of the test when he musters up just a little bit more energy for a small increase in the final seconds. This is how to properly execute your 1 minute test. See figure 2 below.

In figure 3 below, we see another good example of a 1 minute test. This rider also starts very hard, not quite as hard as the rider in figure 2, but still a hard effort. This riders power continues to degrade for the entire effort and he leave nothing on the table, so to speak. Incredible effort here as well.

The 1 minute test is not an easy test and it hurts, but the great thing is that it’s over quickly! How you do the test is critical to creating your best average watts for that minute. It’s important that you do the test at the end of a rest week and on a steep enough hill. Be careful about using any energy on the ride to the hill and then just slam the test right from the start. You’ll die a thousand deaths, but at least you put out your best watts ! Be sure to test your 1 minute every 8 weeks, just like you do your FTP, as it can give you a great indicator of improvement in your Anaerobic Capacity and also tell you if you are too fatigued. After a rest week, you should have a good test, and if you don’t then it probably means you need a couple more days of rest. I hope this helps you to learn even more about your unique abilities and the areas you should and should not train.

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Increasing the size of your bath tub.

Posted on April 7, 2021 by Hunter Allen

By Hunter Allen

I am often asked many great questions. One of the questions that I am asked often is, “Which is better to improve your threshold power, riding longer rides or doing more intervals in shorter rides?” The great thing about being a cycling coach is that most, if not all, your answers to questions such as this are always: “It depends”…. Seriously though, there are times when you should do longer rides in order to improve your stamina and other times when you should do shorter, harder intensity rides to improve your absolute threshold number. How should you decide which you should do and when? Let’s first examine a metaphor that I like to teach at many of my power seminars in order to teach the importance of both types of rides and then dig deeper into the decision making process.

Let’s say for instance, that every cyclist has a “bathtub” of fitness. In your bathtub, you have a drain, bathtub walls, a spigot, and some Hot and cold handles. Some cyclists have a very big bathtub but with small walls. These are the riders that can ride across the USA, with panniers and a tent, spending 12-14 hours rolling along at 14mph and seeing the sights over a summer. They have incredible endurance, but at a slow pace. They never “overflow” the walls of the bathtub because they just don’t ride at an intense enough pace to flood the massive floor of their bathtub. Then there are those that have two 50 gallon drums stacked on top of each other, tall walls but relatively small in volume. These are the sprinters on the track. Their bathtub can be “fire-hosed” for about a minute or two before it fills up and overflows onto the bathroom floor and since the drain is relatively small, they have to wait a while before they can “fire-hose” it again. Then there are the road racers and stage racers; they have both a relatively large bathtub with tall walls. These riders can handle a high flow of water into their bathtub and even some limited “fire hosing” as well. Ultimately, that’s what most of us want, the largest volume bathtub with the tallest walls. This would be the ultimate in the “bathtub” of fitness.

Inside each bathtub, there is a drain that controls the flow of water out of the bathtub and the size of your “drain” is incredibly important to your ability to handle the water pouring into it. The larger the drain, the more work you can handle as a cyclist. In our metaphor, the drain is your aerobic efficiency, or how developed your cardiovascular system is within your body. The more developed your aerobic system, the larger the drain and the more you train and longer you have trained the larger the drain. Aerobic capacity and efficiency refers to the number of capillaries you have in your muscles, the number and size of the mitochondria in your cells, the stroke volume in your heart, the size of your heart and the maximized capacity of your lungs, along with many other factors. The bottom line is: the bigger your “drain”, the more efficient you are at riding at a higher intensity for a longer time, which is endurance or stamina. A road cyclist wants to first improve their drain and then begin working on improving the height of the walls in the bathtub. In order to do this, you must first “stress” the drain, by adding water pressure to it, which means you need to fill up the bathtub to at least three-fours full and once you have enough water pressure on the drain, then you need to maintain it for as long as you can by keeping the water or ‘dose of training/watts’ coming out of the spigot at the same rate as the water emptying out of the drain. The body senses this “stress” and responds by increasing the size of the drain. Any prolonged high-ish level of water in the bathtub, so to speak, will cause the drain size to increase. From a training perspective, this means riding at an upper tempo pace (85-95% of FTP) will create enough water pressure on the drain to improve aerobic efficiency. This is really the first step towards increased fitness and if you are working on increasing your overall FTP. Train your drain first.

In order to increase the height of the walls in the bathtub, then you need to stress the current height of the walls. This is done by adding so much water to the bathtub that the water level goes over the edge and floods the floor of the bathroom or gets right up to the edge and threatens to flood. This type of stress means riding right at your threshold power or “on the edge” and also just above it, so that the water is constantly at its maximum capacity of the bathtub. The body responds to this type of stress, by increasing the height of the walls in order to prevent the water from escaping. Of course, you can train at Level 4 or your functional threshold power before you “train the drain”, and increase the height of the walls, but then you will be left with a small drain in relation to the walls. What this means in practical terms is that you will be able to ride at your threshold or slightly above for a 20-30minute period and not much longer and then need to wait for a while (30minutes or more) to allow the water to drain out, before having the ability to do another 20-30minute threshold interval. If you haven’t figured it out yet, in our metaphor here, “water” is lactate in the blood.

Can you do both things at once? Increase the height of your bathtub walls (FTP) and the size of your drain (aerobic efficiency/endurance)? Of course! One of the best ways to do this is by doing what I call the “Sweet Spot with Bursts” intervals. These intervals are correctly done when you ride for 20minutes at your “Sweet Spot” (88-93% of FTP) and then every two minutes for the entire 20minute period, you do a hard burst of effort up to 120% of FTP for 30seconds and then recover back to sweet spot, but not lower. This is like filling the bathtub about 3/4 ‘s full, then taking a fire hose and blasting water into the tub for 30seconds, just enough to get the water to the top and overflowing into the floor and then shutting off the fire hose. Once the water drains back down to ¾’s full again, you “fire hose” it again! By doing this, you increase the water pressure on the drain and at the same time you increase the height of the walls in the bathtub, hereby increasing both FTP and endurance.

Now, back to our original question of when should you work on which of the two components of the “Bathtub of Fitness”? I will always say that you should increase the size of your drain first (endurance/aerobic efficiency) and then work on the height of the walls (FTP) second. This is the general progression in periodization to begin with and it allows you to build a solid foundation of fitness, and increasing your FTP after you have established that initial level of fitness. Once you are in the racing season or in the middle of the summer, then you might consider working on the height of the walls first. As you probably know, your FTP and endurance increase and decrease in a wave like pattern through the season and if you are in the middle of the season and have just come off a long block of hard racing, you might best be served by continuing to work on the height of walls (FTP), instead of going back to increasing the size of the drain. The key to doing this making sure that limit these intense workouts to only two a week. If you do too much of the FTP work, then the size of the drain will begin to shrink and while you’ll have great form for criterium racing, you’ll be toast after an hour and half in a Road race. So, conversely, if you just have finished a week long criterium series with tons of FTP work, then I would suggest working on your endurance (drain) in order to prepare yourself for any longer rides. Yet another scenario might be that you have a strong spring of racing and riding, and then decide to take a break for a month or two afterward, just riding casually and not doing any specific training. In the late summer and early fall you decide you want to race in Cyclo-cross races and perform well. In this case, I would work the “drain” first for at least 2-3weeks, and then do a week of intensity, working on FTP and then back to the drain for 2 more weeks and finishing with 2 weeks of working heavily on FTP (height of the walls). When in doubt of which to do first, then fall back on working on your endurance/aerobic efficiency and then only when you feel you have done enough work improving the size of your drain, then move onto increasing the height of the walls or work done right at your FTP. The “bathtub of fitness” is a key concept to understand for sustained and solid improvement season after season and year over year. As you progress through your season, making sure you are working on the correct component is always essential to continued growth and hopefully now you have a better understanding of which part of the bathtub is the most important for you.

Plan your Peak for 2021.

Posted on March 31, 2021 by Hunter Allen

We all have the best of intentions leading into the off-season and even after a non-season in 2020, it’s important to have that down time to recharge the battery. That’s a critical part of making your 2021 season even better and if you come into next season with only a 90% charge in the battery you’ll never make that next leap in fitness. One of the critical things that you must examine for next year is whether or not the training you did this year was effective. If you made the improvements you wanted to make then it was definitely effective, but if you didn’t make those gains, you need to change something for 2021. One of the easiest places to make a change is to plan out your peak and sketch out how you are going to get to that peak. Planning for success is something that every winner does and if you don’t plan for success you are planning for failure. How do you plan a season and what things do you take into consideration when training with a power meter? While this column is too short to go into much detail, I would like you to consider five key factors in your planning for 2021.

Power Training Success Factor

#1- Lock in your “A” priority events.

Take time to look at this years’ race calendar and think about all the races or events you did and then which ones you want to do next year and which races are your top priorities. I would suggest making sure that you pick not just one “A” priority event, but make sure there are plenty of races around that “A” race, so that you will be able to take advantage of your peak fitness. I once had an athlete that was determined to win a particular race on June 9 and I did everything to put him on peak form for this race. Unfortunately, he flatted in the first 5 miles of the race and couldn’t get back to the peloton, which was of course highly disappointing not to mention it ended up being a huge waste of the six months leading up to the race. You see, there weren’t any other races within eight hours drive of his home for the next five weeks and he had the best form of his life, and nowhere but the “Tuesday night world championships” to use it. So, I recommend you pick an event that suits your strengths and weaknesses well and also has other events close to that time frame in order to take advantage of your great form. Once you have determined when you want your peak, you can begin to work backwards from there to establish the different macro cycles of training that you’ll be doing. Macro cycles are the phases of training that you’ll focus on for a four to six weeks at a time in order to build a well-rounded level of fitness in which you can create a peak of form. Using a power meter helps you to determine the optimal training load you can handle each week throughout your build and rest cycles. I use Training Stress Score(TSS) in to establish those training loads and more accurately predict needed training loads each week, along with helping to determine length and intensity of rides.

Power Training Success Factor

#2-Know your strengths and weaknesses.

Every six weeks you should be doing the “Power Profile” test, which tests your best efforts at 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 20 minutes. Each of these relate to different energy systems in the body, Neuromuscular Power, Anaerobic Capacity, Vo2 Max, and Functional Threshold Power(FTP), respectively and will change at different times and also in relation to each other. When your fitness improves it is not necessarily true that your sprint will improve with your FTP, or that your Anaerobic Capacity will improve when your sprint does. This makes it critical that you test them on a regular basis so you’ll be able to clearly understand which physiological energy system is changing and by how much. Clearly understanding your strengths and weaknesses determines the type of training that you will be doing within each micro cycle(two to three week periods) and also will help you to determine if your weakness is a barrier to success. For example, if your goal for 2021 is to ride well at the “Assault on Mt. Mitchell”, then you’ll need to be able climb very well and that means you’ll want the highest FTP you can achieve by race day and sprinting really might not be that important to your overall success. However, through your power profile testing you have learned that your sprint (5 second test) is the weakest of your energy systems and your FTP is the strongest (even though you always want it to improve). Should you then spend all of your time training your sprint? No, that probably won’t help you to crush Mt. Mitchell and I would bet even if you trained your sprint 10 hours a week, you would not see much improvement as it tends to be more of a genetic limiter than one that can be improved through training. The bottom line is that you absolutely need to know for certain which are your true strengths and true weaknesses, and as long as you test these regularly, you’ll know when exactly these systems change after each training macro cycle and this will help to keep up on track for your peak along with making you aware of your racing tactical limitations.

Power Training Success Factor

#3 Understand your secondary limiters

– Along with understanding your gross strengths and weaknesses (whether or not I have a strong aerobic or anaerobic ability), you also need to understand how quickly you fatigue within these systems. Some riders may have a tremendous initial ‘snap’ when they sprint, but fatigue quickly after a mere 100 meters of sprinting. Other riders might not have an incredible ‘snap’ but are more ‘diesel engines’ when it comes to closing gaps, chasing down breakaways and hardly seem to fatigue at all no matter the time or distance. The ability to ‘diesel’ means that you have more fatigue resistance than other riders and that fatigue resistance can be a part of each of your energy systems. A sprinter like Mark Cavendish, who has an incredible snap, must win races by coming out of the draft with less than 100meters to go since he has poor fatigue resistance, whereas a sprinter like Peter Sagan needs to start his sprint from 250-300 meters out so he can take advantage of his strong fatigue resistance in the last 50m as others are fading. Mark Cavendish probably can do about 1800 watts for 5 seconds, but then only holds 1000 for 10 seconds and then at 20 seconds is down to 850 watts, whereas Sagan starts out with 1500watts, fatigues to 1300 watts by 10 seconds and still is cranking out 1100 watts at 20 seconds. This fatigue resistance that Sagan has will help him determine his sprint strategy and also the types of training he needs to do in order to improve his snap as well. By using the Power Duration Curve in the TrainingPeaks WKO5 software, you can accurately understand how your watts reduce from 5 seconds to 10 seconds to 20 seconds. Look at each “energy system range to understand if you have more fatigue resistance in one system over the other (Vo2 over AC for example) This might mean you need to do some testing in these time ranges as well. So for your sprint, you need to make sure you test your 5second, 10 second and 20 seconds and then for your Anaerobic Capacity, you should test your 30 seconds, 1 minute and 2 minutes. As you test your fatigue resistance at Vo2 Max, you should test your 3minute, 5 minute and 8 minute ability and then finally you should consider your fatigue resistance at FTP, so that you test your 20 minute, 60 minute and 90 minute best efforts to clearly understand whether you are true ‘diesel’(strong fatigue resistance) or not(poor fatigue resistance). How do you use this increased knowledge of your physiology? By knowing your secondary limiters, you have another area to focus on in your training to help improve those limiters and give you more tactical racing options to use during your races.

Power Training Success Factor

#4 – Plan in your rest days and rest weeks.

Each week, you should have a rest day, where you either stay off the bike completely or just ride ‘embarassingly slow’. This is absolutely a critical factor for success and so many riders just don’t do it. Your body needs to recover, recharge and rebuild for the next day of hard training and a day of very easy riding or complete rest is really the only way to do it. This is the easiest part of training and it’s an important one. Many cyclists ride a little too hard on their easy days in order for them to be truly rest days, so when you do ride easy, go slow, and use your power meter as your governor. Your power should be under 56% of your FTP about 90% of the time, but if you have to do 400 watts to get up a hill or fall over, then do the 400 watts, but maybe you’ll want to select a different route the next easy ride. Throughout your plan for next year, you’ll also want to schedule in rest weeks and these allow you improve as it’s the rest weeks when your body gets stronger from all of the hard training you have been doing. The great thing about planning in rest weeks and then sticking to them is that you force yourself to re-charge your battery no matter whether you feel like it or not. Even though, you might not feel like you need a rest week, you can keep pushing through you could end up compromising your immune system or possibly compromising your next hard build cycle. Scheduling in those rest weeks will control your overall training stress as well and prevent you from overtraining. How much rest do you need in a rest week? I would suggest looking at your Training Stress Score chart so that you can see how many TSS points you accumulate during a normal week of training and then half that amount of TSS for your rest week. If your normal week is between 700-800 TSS, then somewhere between 350-400 TSS for a rest week would be plenty and if you do less that would be fine as well.

TSS chart by week highlighting a rest week.

Power Training Success Factor

#5- Build the Plan and do your best to stick to it.

While this seems relatively simple it’s much harder to actually create, implement and then keep to the plan throughout the season. Life does interfere and that’s one of the more challenging parts about cycling or any activity that you are committed to, and has to be worked around the rest of your life. When you build a training plan, you always work backwards from the goal date and that begins to define your rest weeks, specific training weeks where you focus on your primary and secondary limiters and your “power foundation”. Your power foundation is really the foundation of aerobic work that you lay down in order to be ready for the more specific work needed later. This is not ‘base’ training, as that really is easy riding at endurance pace for hours on end and your power foundation is built on riding more intensely(tempo pace), and for shorter periods of time. In this day and age, we all have less and less time to train, and only the pros or Category 1 riders have time to ride an easy 5 hours every day for months on end and in reality, if we did that, our threshold power would likely decrease from lack of intensity. What I like most about riding at tempo (76-90% of your FTP) is that it creates just enough stress on your aerobic system to maintain fitness and also is tough enough to keep those muscles engaged in pedaling hard on the bike. This dual strain keeps your cardiovascular system primed for later work and also makes sure that you have the needed muscular endurance in order to do the longer rides on weekends and later in the year. If you want to go to the next level, then you have to integrate in a long ride (4-6 hours) at least once and preferably twice a month to achieve the needed cardiovascular and muscular strain to improve. I have a “Next Level” Training plan available here. Your power foundation phase should last for a solid 8 weeks before starting with focusing on your primary and secondary limiters and I would recommend for most people this power foundation phase occurs from December to February depending on when you are planning on peaking. After this phase, you should make sure your plan begins to incorporate specific limiters even if you do just them once a week while continuing your work right at FTP. As you get closer and closer to your peak fitness, you work to improve your shorter anaerobic efforts as your body will adapt much quicker to them than to your longer aerobic efforts. One common mistake that many people make is that they ‘stack’ workouts when they miss them, so avoid this if you can. If you miss the Tuesday workout, then don’t try and push everything back one day so you still get in the workouts. It’s better for you to just move along to the Wednesday workout then worry too much about missing that Tuesday workout. The only exception to this is when the Tuesday workout was addressing a key limiter to success and in that case, substitute the Tuesday workout for Wednesday and just forget about the Wednesday one.

There are many factors that help you to success in cycling and books have been written about them. It’s my hope that this article will inspire you to take some time now and do these steps in order to plan for your success. Make a plan. Plan for success and use your power meter to help you stay on target. If you don’t know you are improving or know your strengths and weaknesses then how will you improve? How will you reach your goal no matter how large or how small. A carpenter does not just tell the guys one day to show up with a ton of wood and we’ll throw something together and then end up with a perfect house. Each carpenter starts with a blueprint, a plan, a way to make sure they are building the house correctly. Once that plan is established then every once in a while situations come along and you have to adapt to them, that’s normal, but you always come back to the master plan. We plan for success in the rest of our lives, and we should do the same in cycling. Measure your results accurately, consistently and you’ll know when to make changes to your training plan so that you do achieve the best possible benefits a training plan can give you.

Hunter Allen is a USA Cycling Level 1 coach and former Professional Cyclist. He is the co-author of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter, co-developer of TrainingPeaks Software, and is the CEO and Founder of the Peaks Coaching Group. 2021 will be the 24^th year that he has conducted training camps in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. Where did the time go? We don’t know, but it’s time for you to come to a camp! www.PeaksCoachingGroup.com/camps

Commit to a Determined Practice

Posted on August 30, 2020 by Hunter Allen

by Hunter Allen, President and CEO of Peaks Coaching Group

After reading Motivation is Overrated by Brad Stulberg, I was inspired.

It spoke to me and to my memories of all of the hours of hard training I have put in over the past 40 years. I started racing bicycles when I was 11, and I begged my Mom and Dad to take me to a BMX race. Since then, I have ridden and raced all over the world and spent thousands and thousands of hours sweating on a bicycle.

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I have not been singularly focused though. When I retired from pro racing, I took up rock climbing, ice climbing, and then yoga and tai chi (at first to help my rock climbing, later as a means of inner exploration).

Again, thousands of hours of fun, frustration, sweat, tears and amazing adventures. Since then, I have been fortunate to do some car racing the past 12 years, and let me tell you, winning a car race is much, much harder than ever winning a bicycle race! And during these 40 years, cycling has been there for me. It’s been the underlying practice that I have committed to each week.

What inspired me about Stulberg’s article is the simple premise that I have been living and using for all those 40 years. That is: “You do not need an event to be motivated.”

I practiced BMX freestyle tricks in my parents parking lot for hours, and hours and there were never any competitions, There was only the zeal to improve and learn the tricks.

I did pull ups for hours and built a climbing wall in my backyard–and in 8 years of serious rock climbing–I only competed in a single indoor climbing competition (I won 😉).

Committing to a determined practice was something that I just did. I enjoyed pedaling, I enjoyed climbing, I enjoyed breathing and moving, I enjoyed focusing–and I committed.

Some days are better than others, and your motivation will be stronger some days than other days, that’s normal, but one thing you need to do is to “commit to a determined practice.”

Just do it, as the Nike slogan says. Don’t think too much. Ride your bike every day, every week, every month, whether you want to or not. Do your intervals, climb the mountains, sweat, drink and become the human water filter. You don’t need an event to define your training, to define your improvements, to give you reason to train or keep you focused.

While reading Stulberg’s article, it made me think of all of the martial arts students around the world that practice their katas each day, practice their moves, throws, blocks and special styles. They have committed to a determined practice. They are the water carriers.

They carry the water every day whether it’s raining or sunny, or they are hungry or cold. They get it done. They commit to a determined practice and while there are martial art competitions, most never go to one. They practice for the sake of learning or improving and for life.

What about cycling? What about you? Do you really need an “event” to stay motivated to train hard?

To push yourself during the next interval. No, you don’t. You do need a goal though and that can be as simple as trying to improve your time on your local hill/climb/flat road.

Your goal can be a simple as wanting to finish strong in the next ride with your friends, or maybe it’s just finishing a 60 mile ride with energy to spare. Goals are important and of course some of your goals can be events, but don’t allow events to be your only goals and determine your focus. Find other sources of motivation and one of those should be: Commit to a determined practice. Get out there and pedal. Go. Don’t think. Just go.

One of my favorite T-shirts, I picked up a couple of years ago at the Philmont Boy Scout Ranch in New Mexico where both my sons spent 10 days hiking through the ranch. We hiked over 90 miles in those 10 days through amazing terrain during the middle of summer.

The shirt summed up a philosophy that I have come to live and appreciate in all areas of my life. It’s simple, and it’s message is: “The Pursuit is Happiness.”

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There is no destination, there is no event, there is only the pleasure and pain of the pursuit. This is where the daily intervals, feeling in the legs and the profuse sweat only become components of the pursuit.

What components are in your pursuit? What do you look back on now after having accomplished a goal and feel, see, and understand the most satisfying parts were?

Explore those memories and associated feelings the next time you commit.

Hunter Allen is a is a USA Cycling Level 1 coach and former professional cyclist. He is the coauthor of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” and “Cutting-Edge Cycling,” co-developer of TrainingPeaks’ WKO software, and CEO and founder of Peaks Coaching Group. He and his coaches create custom training plans for all levels of athletes.

the 6 types of cyclists during the age of covid

The Six Types of Cyclists During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Hunter Allen

During Global Meltdown 2020–there are those who do and those who do even more. Then…there are those coached by Hunter.

#humorisNOTcancelled

Hunter, ever the mountain-top philosopher, has been reading, examining and studying the dearth of cyclists out there on social media. In fact, to the chagrin of his staff, he spends most of everyday on Facebook. In this time of deep, creative reflection–he has found six distinct types of Covid-19 cyclists. And in characteristic Hunter–it’s really a love story! (Hint: read to the end!)

By Hunter Allen, President and CEO of Peaks Laughing Group

1) The Steve

Steve has been waiting for this moment his whole life. He has been going out and crushing people’s Strava KOM’s all around the countryside. He was about to peak right before “the rona” and decided to just “screw it” and has been training like a madman since.

When the weather has actually been bad, he’s won nearly every Zwift event that he’s entered using his actual weight. He has a backup smart trainer, 2 laptops and more ANT+ dongles than he cares to mention in case one goes down. He has 6 months of sports nutrition provisions in the basement and continues to “Beet dope” before every ride, makes recovery shakes daily, and liberally uses his massive supply of UCAN and Ketones as needed.

Oh, and in case the SHTF really happens, his bug-out bike is loaded with panniers is in the garage ready for any immediate evacuation by bike, complete with his AR-15 and 1000 rounds of ammo.

Steve demands twice weekly online meetings, and I continue to make his plan as hard as hell. “Embrace the suck” he says. I feel like he’s sizing me up as I see him on the webcam. Steve will survive this, and he will take your Strava KOM and/or kill you if he needs to.

2) The Dave

He is standing at his window wearing skinny jeans and a organic hemp t-shirt wondering if he will get “the rona” if he goes out on the bike today and rides past someone. He wants me to ease off his training plan and workouts, making sure all the intervals are 10% less than normal just in case his immune system is lowered after his workout. He has been riding all damn winter on Zwift, and now that it’s spring, he can’t decide in the face of COVID to go out or just get back on that damn smart trainer. If he chooses the trainer, we worries that he will be constantly “run over” by all the virtual people that are “weight doping.”

He is mad because there were no organic energy bars at Whole Foods today, and the internet went down during yesterday’s virtual online race. He shows me on his webcam where he has taped a 6 ft no go zone line around his bike, so the UPS man won’t get close to it when his “wine of the month” club box shows up.

I try to keep him focused on the positive and tell him that he will be killing people this Fall when it all comes back. I analyze his power data during his latest Zwift race and show him that his FRC has bumped up 5 kJ’s, which he’s somewhat excited about. Dave will not get any new Strava KOM’s and might quit cycling altogether when this is all over.

Steve will probably drop by and heckle him after taking his last KOM and show off his AR.

3) The Bob

Bob thinks all this is a crock of $%^& and can’t believe that anyone would fall for this crap. The government is just using this as a way to crash the economy, make us all“chipped,” kill endurance events, stop bike racing, and prevent us from riding in the local, state and National parks unless we have the proper “papers” or RFID chip.

“Can you believe they closed the freaking trails at Snowcone park? I mean, hell, I haven’t ever even seen more than 5 people at those MTB trails before! That’s the great thing about them, they are so freaking rocky and rooty that no one is tough enough to ride there.”

He assures me that he’s going there anyway, either after dark or at first light in the morning when none of the “goobermint” stooges are out.

I am giving Bob a solid block of FTP and VO2 training because he had a setback this winter, lost some fitness and now can “catch up” to all those “dumbasses that are easing off their training.” He’s not worried about running out of sports nutrition stuff, because, well, I just eat regular food when riding anyhow, like normal non-cyclists would do before they became indoctrinated into the marketing hype of the evil sports nutrition companies.

Bob’s FTP will continue to increase, and when he shows up at the first race back, he’ll either kick everyone’s ass or have some excuse about why he got a flat tire because the tire was made in China, and they are sending crap products over here to make us all ride like a bunch of losers!

4) The Nancy

She washes all her cycling clothes twice, sprays down her bike with Lysol every hour, and carries a small thing of Lysol with her on any outdoor bike ride. She’s bought all the Clorox wipes, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, pasta, chicken and Gatorade from the local grocery chain and used most of the Clorox wipes cleaning her smart trainer, bike, shoes, Garmin, cell phone and helmet. She’s made face masks out of old cycling jerseys and even made one from her team jersey, so that the team sponsors are shown clearly for her webcam rides inside CVRcade.

She has quarantined her kids and sprays them with a mixture of leaves, lavender, and mint essential oils daily. She has posted every link known to man about “The Rona” on her social media–complete with pics of her in her team mask out on rides and on the trainer making sure that everyone knows she is riding solo and properly social distancing. She will spray you if you break the 6 ft rule (with the small canister of Lysol in her jersey pocket).

I do a lot of listening to Nancy on our skype calls, nod my head and make sure that she’s staying within her training zones. She’ll get the training response we need right now, without compromising any events this Fall. She doesn’t really care about her power numbers, but is quick to make sure that her arch-rival Sally is still behind her in her Strava QOM’s. She will last longer than Dave, but not Steve. Nancy will only marry Steve–if it’s THE Steve from the latest rendition of Hawaii Five-O.

5) The Susan

She has called everybody in her cycling club and read them the latest news on “The Rona.” She asked for the manager at Food Lion, Walmart, Publix, McDonalds, Chi-Fil-A, and Vons all before noon demanding more toilet paper, taking it to her cycling club friends that can’t get out. Susan’s kids and “EX” are currently faking “The Rona” to avoid her.

I am doing my best to give her constructive feedback on her workouts, but she’s only done one in the last week because she’s been too “upset and obsessed” about “The Rona” and just can’t get focused to go for a bike ride either on her “dumb” trainer or outside. However, she promises me that if it’s nice, and the wind isn’t blowing this weekend, she’s going for a ride with one of her teammates that for certain hasn’t been exposed to the Covid-19.

To be honest, I’m struggling to coach her, and I have resorted to just texting her funny jokes as she seems to like those. Karen will not survive longer than Dave, but they might hook up before this is all over.

6) The Kim

She’s been listening to me talk about how great Zwift, CVRcade, TrainerRoad, and Rouvy are for over 8 months now, but has been adamant in just loading her workout onto her Garmin and following it to the letter– even if it means the load is so insane that she has to stand on the pedals to make them turn at 5rpm. She’s finally relented and has gotten a Zwift account, and after doing her second race, claims that is was both super fun and “how in the hell is everyone so strong on this thing?” She also stated, “I can’t wait to get back to real world racing where I can crush these sandbaggers.”

In our weekly online meetings, she’s usually in the backyard with her bikini on as she’s sunbathing after her indoor races watching her kids have a water balloon fight with the neighbor kids, while polishing off her second glass of wine. She went to the store and bought 2 cases of pop tarts, 6 boxes of cereal, 8 bags of pizza rolls, and a 6 roll pack of toilet paper. Then stopped at the bike shop for more gels, energy drink mix and to flirt with the cute bike shop guys. In our online meetings, there is always a playlist of The Grateful Dead, Luke Bryan, and AC/DC playing in the background.

I’m now working on the 3^rd revision to her training plan this week, because now she wants to do both a workout each day and a Zwift race as well. Kim will survive and marry Steve. Together they will repopulate the earth. ❤️

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Are you a different type of cyclist? Leave a comment below!

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Hunter Allen is a is a USA Tricycling Level 1 coach and former professional tricyclist. He is the coauthor of “Training and Racing with a Power Thingy” and “Cutting-Edge Bug Spray,” co-developer of TrainingPeaks’ WT%$@# software, and CEO and founder of Peaks Laughing Group. He and his coaches create custom misery for all levels of athletes.

FITNESS AND IMMUNITY

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Hunter Allen

QUESTION: How hard is too hard? Will cycling compromise my immune system?

#cyclingisNOTcancelled

Hunter has been inundated with immunity-themed questions over the past few weeks. In these uncertain times, how can we remain fit–while best supporting our immune systems?

By Hunter Allen

Many of you know that your immune system can be compromised after a hard workout and have been rightly concerned about just what constitutes a “hard workout?” For everyone reading this article, know that you are some of the fittest people on the planet–and are probably fitter than 95% of the rest of the population.

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Increased fitness is a huge benefit of all those long rides, hill repeats, hard races and climbing up mountains–and one of the many reasons you love to ride! The basic problem is: in these precarious times–how hard is too hard? What even constitutes a “hard workout? A “hard workout” for a newbie is very different than a “hard workout” for a long-time cyclist.

So how can we properly define a hard workout?

Any ride in which you come home and are “crushed.” You barely can make it through the door and head straight to the fridge for immediate food or to the blender for a recovery shake. I remember one time that my best friend and I did one of these epic efforts in college, and I went to his dorm room about 45minutes after the ride–and he was asleep in the bed with his helmet, cycling kit and cycling shoes still on!
Any ride that you accumulate over 90 minutes of work at your FTP and above. This is a lot of intensity right now and probably should be avoided as well.
Any ride over 300 TSS. I would even limit your rides to 275 TSS for now to be safe, but for sure, stay below 300 TSS for your rides.
Any ride that stresses you “thermally” for more than 2.5 hours and/or in which you become dehydrated. Some of you live in hot environments, and riding in a very hot and/or humid environments for over 2.5 hours is enough thermal stress to be a bit concerned about. This also goes for dehydration. Keep yourself hydrated in ALL your rides, much less the ones that are hotter. Keep yourself cool and hydrated.
Any ride in the rain! Riding in the rain itself isn’t going to make you sick or compromise your immune system. BUT there is a lot of bacteria on the roads and trails that gets flung up into your mouth and nostrils and that can easily make you sick. If it’s raining outside, ride indoors.

I hope this helps to define what constitutes a “hard ride” or “hard workout.” And just as important–I hope this prevents you from going too deep in the next few months, yet still pushing yourself to maintain fitness and boost immunity.

It’s perfectly fine to do hard intervals and hard workouts–just follow the suggestions above, and you should keep that immune system strong.

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Hunter Allen is a is a USA Cycling Level 1 coach and former professional cyclist. He is the coauthor of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” and “Cutting-Edge Cycling,” co-developer of TrainingPeaks’ WKO software, and CEO and founder of Peaks Coaching Group. He and his coaches create custom training plans for all levels of athletes.

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how to maintain your ftp during the corona virus

How to BEST maintain your fitness during COVID-19

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Hunter Allen

Hunter Allen breaks down how to maintain your FTP between seasons in these turbulent times. As Hunter has been saying for years: “Maintaining is training and training is maintaining.”

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By Hunter Allen, President and CEO of Peaks Coaching Group

Maintenance. It’s what you should do now. I have read about coaches that are still prescribing hard, hard workouts to their athletes, and I have read about coaches just throwing their arms up in the air and do not know what to do with their athletes. So, let’s solve these problems now.

1: Take the fitness you have (unless you are peaking now, then skip to #3 below) and maintain it.

What does that mean exactly? It means that you need to keep your Chronic Training Load (CTL) the same as it is now and plateau it. This means that you will continue to workout and ride and do some intervals, but not doing intervals 3-4 days a week. One set of intervals per week is fine.

What kind of intervals should you continue to do? Well, sweet spot of course! Just below your FTP is a perfect place to stay to maintain your fitness. It’s enough strain to cause the needed stress in order to maintain your fitness. How much is right amount? I would suggest at least 40-60 minutes per week of sweet spot work. Now if you want you can do sweet spot with bursts every two minutes to 120% of your FTP to keep your ability to change speeds or even ride right at your FTP. Those are all fine.

2: Hours per week should remain roughly the same.

IF you are riding 8-10 hours a week, it’s fine to maintain those hours. Just reduce the intensity. Keep riding for both your physical and mental health, but be sure to reduce your intensity so you are not creating too much training stress. This is critical to preventing a peak of fitness in the middle to late April.

3: What if you are peaking or about to peak NOW!?

Oh Sugar! If you had planned on peaking in late March through April– and/or you are peaking now–then it’s time to shut it down and LOSE some fitness. Yes, you need to shut it down and lose fitness. Why? Well, the world is going to return to normal–and there will be gran fondos, races, rides, etc., later this year. When that return date will be, we don’t know, but let’s be optimistic and say they will be in the late summer.

So you have 4 months (April, May, June, July) to create another peak of fitness for the season at the end of the year. That’s what you need in order to create a second peak of fitness.

How much fitness should you lose?

Well, if your FTP is 250 watts now, then let it drop to 230. If it’s 300 watts now, let it drop to 280. You should let your fitness drop roughly 7-10% of your peak fitness and that’s enough to give your body a little rest, along with not losing too much that you have to dig out from a hole. Why? Remember that fitness improves in 6-8 week cycles. SO, when things start to return to normal, you can easily begin training like mad again and create the peak that you wanted to begin with.

4: What about those of us that love doing hard intervals and riding our indoor trainers and we don’t necessarily have a specific event goal?

Carry on. There is no reason to stop working out and pushing it if you want to. #Cyclinghasnotbeencancelled So, if you’re psyched and motivated to keep doing hard intervals and pushing it–then do it. The riders that need to move into maintenance mode are the ones that were doing events now or in the coming 4 months.

The riders that need to move into maintenance mode are the ones that are doing events now or in the coming 4 months.

5: What about those of us that are really out of shape and we were on a “comeback?”

These riders can continue to do harder workouts and improve their fitness, lose body fat, etc. Continue on with your hard and smart work! Let’s get your FTP back up to where it was years ago or to where it should be–and then enter into the maintenance phase.

6: Immune system suppression: Should I be worried about suppressing my immune system from working out too hard?

Yes, Yes, you should be concerned. BUT, only if you dig deep. Only if you come back to the house after a 4 hour ride where you did 20 intervals and you barely make it in the door because you are so fatigued. Yes, in those cases, you should be concerned. For the rest of us that are doing 1 hour workouts with some intervals in there, then do not worry about it. Your workouts are not hard enough (sorry) to suppress your immune system. Only when you go long (over 3hours) and are doing tons of hard work, should you be worried. Now, that does not mean you can go out and drink beers with your buddies after either though! Maintain social distance for now.

Maintenance is the answer that 80% of us should be doing now. Keep riding, keep having fun.

When I ride, I am reminded of the “normalcy” of life and how doing a fun ride, sweating, breathing hard and burning some calories helps me to reduce and relieve stress. It’s my rock. It’s home. It’s the foundation that makes life good. So get in a workout, sweat, have fun, and remember that all you need to do is just reduce the intensity a bit so that you’ll be ready to rock it out when it all comes back. Because it is.

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Planning and Nailing your Peak

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Hunter Allen

For Hunter Allen–nailing your peak–is the holy grail of training and racing. When done right–you’re flyin’. When missed–your competitors are.

By PCG Founder & Coach Hunter Allen

We all have the best intentions leading into the off-season, and at the end of a big season it’s important to have that down time to recharge the battery. It’s a critical part of making your next season even better; if you come into next season with only a 90% charge in the battery, you’ll never make that next leap in fitness.

EXPLORE PLANS TO PEAK

A critical thing to examine for next year is whether or not the training you did this year was effective. If you made the improvements you wanted to make, it was definitely effective, but if you didn’t make those gains, you need to change something for next year.

One of the easiest ways to make a change is to plan out your peak and how you’re going to get to that peak. If you don’t plan for success, you’re planning for failure.

How do you plan a season? What should you take into consideration when training with a power meter? There isn’t enough space here to go into much detail, but I have five key factors to consider in your planning for next year.

Power Training Success Factor 1: Lock in your “A” priority events.

Take time to look at your calendar and think about all the races or events you did this year, which ones you want to do next year, and which races are your top priorities. Make sure to pick more than one “A” priority event, and make sure there are plenty of races around the top “A” race so you’ll be able to take advantage of your peak fitness.

I once had an athlete who was determined to win a particular race on June 9, so I did everything to put him on peak form for this race. Unfortunately he flatted in the first five miles of the race and couldn’t get back to the peloton, and it ended up being a huge waste of the six months leading up to the race because there weren’t any other races within eight hours’ drive of his home for the next five weeks. He had the best form of his life and nowhere but the Tuesday night world championships to use it.

I recommend picking an event that suits your strengths and weaknesses well and that also has other events close to the same time frame in order to take advantage of your great form.

Once you determine when you want your peak, you can begin to work backward from there to establish the different macro cycles of training that you’ll be doing.

Macro cycles are the phases of training that you’ll focus on for four to six weeks at a time in order to build a well-rounded level of fitness in which you can create a peak of form. Using a power meter helps you determine the optimal training load you can handle each week throughout your build and rest cycles. I use training stress score (TSS) to establish those training loads and more accurately predict needed training loads each week, along with helping to determine length and intensity of rides.

Power Training Success Factor 2: Know your strengths and weaknesses.

Every six weeks you should be doing a power profile test, which tests your best efforts at 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 20 minutes. Each of these relate to different energy systems in the body (neuromuscular power, anaerobic capacity, VO2Max, and functional threshold power [FTP], respectively) and will change at different times and in relation to each other.

When your fitness improves, it isn’t necessarily true that your sprint will improve with your FTP or that your anaerobic capacity will improve when your sprint does. This makes it critical that you test them on a regular basis so you’ll be able to clearly understand which physiological energy system is changing and by how much.

Clearly understanding your strengths and weaknesses determines the type of training that you will be doing within each micro cycle (two to three week periods) and will also help you determine if your weakness is a barrier to success. For example, if your goal for next year is the Tour of Gila, you’ll need to be able to climb very well, which means that you’ll want the highest FTP you can achieve and that sprinting really might not be that important to your overall success. However, let’s say that in your power profile testing you’ve learned that your sprint (5-second test) is the weakest of your energy systems and your FTP is the strongest (even though we always want it to improve). Should you then spend all of your time training your sprint? No, that probably won’t help you to win the Tour of Gila, and I would bet that even if you trained your sprint ten hours a week, you wouldn’t see much improvement, as it tends to be more of a genetic limiter than one that can be improved through training.

The bottom line is that you absolutely need to know for certain which are your true strengths and true weaknesses, and as long as you test these regularly, you’ll know when these systems change after each training macro cycle; this will help keep you on track for your peak and make you aware of your racing tactical limitations.

Power Training Success Factor 3: Understand your secondary limiters.

Along with understanding your gross strengths and weaknesses (whether or not you have a strong aerobic or anaerobic ability), you also need to understand how quickly you fatigue within these systems.

Some riders may have a tremendous initial “snap” when they sprint but fatigue quickly after a mere 100 meters of sprinting. Other riders might not have an incredible snap but are more “diesel engines” when it comes to closing gaps and chasing down breakaways, hardly seeming to fatigue at all, no matter the time or distance. The ability to “diesel” means you have more fatigue resistance than other riders and that fatigue resistance can be a part of each of your energy systems.

A sprinter like Robbie McEwen, who has an incredible snap, wins races by coming out of the draft with less than 100 meters to go since he has poor fatigue resistance, whereas a sprinter like Alessandro Petacchi needs to start his sprint from 250-300 meters out so he can take advantage of his strong fatigue resistance in the last 50m as others are fading. Robbie McEwen probably can do about 1800 watts for 5 seconds but then only holds 1000 for 10 seconds and then at 20 seconds is down to 850 watts, whereas Petacchi starts out with 1500 watts, fatigues to 1300 watts by 10 seconds, and still is cranking out 1100 watts at 20 seconds. Petacchi’s fatigue resistance will help him determine his sprint strategy and the types of training he needs to do in order to improve his snap.

The fatigue profiling test is similar to the power profile test but extends each time period on either side of the test periods. So for your sprint, make sure you test your 5 seconds, 10 seconds and 20 seconds, and for your anaerobic capacity test your 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 2 minutes. As you test your fatigue resistance at VO2Max, you should test your 3-minute, 5-minute and 8-minute ability. Finally, you should consider your fatigue resistance at FTP, testing your 20-minute, 60-minute, and 90-minute best efforts to clearly understand whether you are true diesel (strongly fatigue resistant) or not (poorly fatigue resistant).

How do you use this increased knowledge of your physiology? By knowing your secondary limiters, you have another area to focus on in your training to help improve those limiters and give you more tactical racing options to use during your races.

Power Training Success Factor 4: Plan in your rest days and rest weeks.

Each week you should have a rest day, when you either stay off the bike completely or ride embarrassingly slow. This is absolutely a critical factor for success, and so many riders just don’t do it. Your body needs to recover, recharge, and rebuild for the next day of hard training, and a day of very easy riding or complete rest is the only way to do it.

This is the easiest part of training and an important one. Many cyclists ride a little too hard on their easy days for them to be truly rest days, so when you do ride easy, go slow and use your power meter as your governor. Your power should be under 56% of your FTP about 90% of the time, but if you have to do 400 watts to get up a hill without falling over, then do the 400 watts, but maybe you’ll want to select a different route for your next easy ride.

In addition to rest days, you’ll also want to schedule rest weeks throughout your plan for next year, since it is in the rest weeks when your body gets stronger from all the hard training.

The great thing about planning in rest weeks and then sticking to them is that you force yourself to recharge your battery whether you feel like it or not. Even though you might not feel like you need a rest week and want to keep pushing through, you could end up compromising your immune system or possibly compromising your next hard build cycle. Scheduling in those rest weeks will control your overall training stress, as well, and prevent you from overtraining.

How much rest do you need in a rest week? I suggest looking at your training stress score chart to see how many TSS points you accumulate during a normal week of training and then figure half that amount of TSS for your rest week. For example, if your normal week is between 700 and 800 TSS, somewhere between 350-400 TSS for a rest week would be plenty, and it’s fine to do less.

Power Training Success Factor 5: Build the plan and do your best to stick to it.

While this seems relatively simple, it’s often quite hard to actually create, implement, and then keep to a plan throughout the season. Life does interfere. It’s one of the more challenging parts of cycling (or any activity you’re committed to) and has to be worked around the rest of your life.

When you build a training plan, you always work backward from the goal date, which begins to define your rest weeks and specific training weeks when you focus on your primary and secondary limiters and your power foundation. Your power foundation is really the foundation of aerobic work that you lay down in order to be ready for the more specific work needed later. This is not base training, which is easy riding at endurance pace for hours on end; your power foundation is built on riding more intensely (tempo pace) and for shorter periods of time.

In this day and age, we all have less and less time to train, and only the pros or Category 1 riders have time to ride an easy 5 hours every day for months on end. If we did that, our threshold power would likely decrease from lack of intensity. What I like most about riding at tempo (76-90% of your FTP) is that it creates just enough stress on your aerobic system to maintain fitness while being tough enough to keep those muscles engaged in pedaling hard on the bike. This dual strain keeps your cardiovascular system primed for later work and also makes sure you have the needed muscular endurance to do the longer rides on the weekends and later in the year.

If you want to go to the next level, you have to do a long ride (4-6 hours) at least once and preferably twice a month to achieve the needed cardiovascular and muscular strain to improve. Your power foundation phase should last for a solid 8 weeks before starting to focus on your primary and secondary limiters. I recommend for most people that this power foundation phase occur from December to February, depending on when you are planning on peaking. After this phase you should make sure your plan begins to incorporate specific limiters, even if you do them just once a week while continuing your work right at FTP. As you get closer and closer to your peak fitness, you’ll work to improve your shorter anaerobic efforts, as your body will adapt much quicker to them than to longer aerobic efforts.

One common mistake that many people make is “stacking” workouts when they miss them, so avoid this if you can. If you miss a Tuesday workout, don’t try to push everything back a day so you still get in the workouts. It’s better to just move along to the Wednesday workout than to worry too much about missing Tuesday. The only exception to this is when the Tuesday workout addressed a key limiter to success; in that case, substitute the Tuesday workout for Wednesday and just forget about the Wednesday one.

There are many factors that help you to succeed in cycling, and many books have been written about them, but it’s my hope that this article will inspire you to take some time right now to follow these five steps and plan for your success.

Make a plan. Plan for success and use your power meter to help you stay on target. If you don’t know you’re improving, or if you don’t know your strengths and weaknesses, how will you improve? How will you reach your goal, no matter how large or how small? A carpenter doesn’t tell the guys one day to show up with a ton of wood, throw things together, and end up with a perfect house. Every carpenter starts with a blueprint, a plan, a way to make sure he’s building the house correctly.

Once that plan is established, every once in a while situations come along that have to be adapted to. That’s normal, but we always come back to the master plan. We plan for success in the rest of our lives, and we should do the same in cycling. Measure your results accurately and consistently, and you’ll know when to make changes to your training plan so that you do achieve the best possible benefits a training plan can give you.

DISCUSS TRAINING WITH COACH HUNTER ALLEN

Hunter Allen is a is a USA Cycling Level 1 coach and former professional cyclist. He is the coauthor of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” and “Cutting-Edge Cycling,” co-developer of TrainingPeaks’ WKO software, and CEO and founder of Peaks Coaching Group. He and his coaches create custom training plans for all levels of athletes.

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Smart Training Investment #1

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Smart Training Investment #4

By: Hunter Allen

How to properly test your one minute.

Here is the exact testing protocol that you should use to crack out your best 1 minute.

By Hunter Allen

Power Training Success Factor

#1- Lock in your “A” priority events.

Power Training Success Factor

#2-Know your strengths and weaknesses.

Power Training Success Factor

#3 Understand your secondary limiters

Power Training Success Factor

#4 – Plan in your rest days and rest weeks.

Power Training Success Factor

#5- Build the Plan and do your best to stick to it.

by Hunter Allen, President and CEO of Peaks Coaching Group

By Hunter Allen, President and CEO of Peaks Laughing Group

1) The Steve

2) The Dave

3) The Bob

4) The Nancy

5) The Susan

6) The Kim

QUESTION: How hard is too hard? Will cycling compromise my immune system?

By Hunter Allen

So how can we properly define a hard workout?

Hunter Allen breaks down how to maintain your FTP between seasons in these turbulent times. As Hunter has been saying for years: “Maintaining is training and training is maintaining.”

By Hunter Allen, President and CEO of Peaks Coaching Group

1: Take the fitness you have (unless you are peaking now, then skip to #3 below) and maintain it.

2: Hours per week should remain roughly the same.

3: What if you are peaking or about to peak NOW!?

4: What about those of us that love doing hard intervals and riding our indoor trainers and we don’t necessarily have a specific event goal?

5: What about those of us that are really out of shape and we were on a “comeback?”

6: Immune system suppression: Should I be worried about suppressing my immune system from working out too hard?

By PCG Founder & Coach Hunter Allen

Power Training Success Factor 1: Lock in your “A” priority events.

Power Training Success Factor 2: Know your strengths and weaknesses.

Power Training Success Factor 3: Understand your secondary limiters.

Power Training Success Factor 4: Plan in your rest days and rest weeks.

Power Training Success Factor 5: Build the plan and do your best to stick to it.