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.