Welcome to my first article for BicycleThailand.com I’m just back from The Tour De Farm having ridden with the ‘CyclingPlus Thailand Team’ that I coached. I was incredibly impressed by the 1000+ cyclists who turned up and rode who all had huge smiles of satisfaction as they crossed the finish line. It was great to see young children, a 75 year old, ladies, novices, racers and so many Nationalities participating in a fun event that was organized so efficiently.
Over the coming months I will be writing articles aimed specifically at training and coaching in Thailand, not revamped UK articles that have no bearing on cycling here. Here are just a few of the articles that I’ll be writing but I’m open to ideas. Just email me with your requests and I’ll see if I can write something.
- How to get fit on 5hrs training a week
- How to train for Doi Inthanon with no hills
- How to set your own training zones
- Nutrition for cycling in Thailand
- Training Tips
- How to lose weight without a crash diet
- Goal setting
Progressive Training
Let’s face it we have all gone out on our first ride overdone the miles and intensity, then had sore legs and been too tired to ride for a few days. Progressively train duration and intensity and you will reach the fitness levels required for your ‘Goal Events’ enjoying your bike and not having sore legs every day. The graph below shows how each week the duration gradually increases as the body adapts to the training stresses it is put under. Every 4th week is an ‘adaptation’ week, your body only gets fitter when it rests and adapts to the training stimulus from the previous 3 weeks. Miss the adaptation week or do too much during them and you will just become more and more fatigued, over trained and ill! One of the biggest mistakes I see athletes making is not resting; we have to juggle work, family and life with the training. Try and juggle too many activities and the balls will just fall down leaving you tired and frustrated.
Why am I doing this training session?
Think of each session as a brick in a brick wall that you are building. Each of these sessions serves a specific purpose to build that wall as high, stable and strong as possible. Miss out one of these ‘bricks’ and the wall won’t be strong enough to build very high and will just come tumbling down at your ‘goal event’. Follow the plans and complete all the sessions as prescribed and your brick wall will be tall, stable and strong allowing you to attain those personal goals.
- Cadence sessions train your legs and body to be able to ride efficiently at varied cadences. When you are riding your ‘Goal Event’ you will need to be able to pedal fast down hills at over 100rpm and slowly up a hill at 80rpm.
- Seated Hill Climbs or big gear work into headwinds for flatlands are useful for 2 reasons
1. To develop strength for better climbing and riding into head winds. Think of it like weight training on the bike for the legs. 2. At low speed and low cadence you can work on pedalling style. - Tempo rides are the key to your success; they help build your ‘engine’ at endurance pace that you can maintain for 2-4 hrs, which is the foundation to building your fitness. The bigger your engine, the higher we can build your threshold pace so don’t miss these out.
- Threshold is the power/effort that you will time trial at. By riding just below and just above threshold you will gradually push and pull it up. You are training your muscles to process the lactic acid (pain) more efficiently at threshold effort.
- Change of Pace is essential for road racing; these train you to change pace in and out of the saddle.
- Intervals are only to be done in the very last block as you need to have a high level of fitness before attempting them. These are very short efforts from 30secs to 4 minutes at the highest intensity you can maintain.
- Base Rides are a good pace for novices to start out with or used as active recovery days for everyone.
Feel free to phone or email me if you would like to discuss coaching packages and please follow me on Facebook to view my daily tips and have a look at the photo albums.
Happy Cycling
Coach JJ
www.jjprocycling.com
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