Cyclingnews Fitness Q&A - November 30, 2011

Cobbles string out the peloton at the Ronde van Drenthe (Image credit: CJ Farquharson/WomensCycling.net)

Topics: Training for a 100 km mountain bike event with road training, More on single-leg pedaling, More on persisting foot numbness, Training volume, Athletes and false Anaemia, Types of Training, Cross training contributing to a pre-season base

Do enough off road to develop or refine your off-roading skills, and the specific upper body and off-saddle strength you need for negotiating challenging terrain, but then do your big-hour training on the road. The kind of fitness you need for endurance MTB events can only be developed through many-minute steady paced efforts, of the sort that are much more likely to happen on the road than on dirt, especially if the particular dirt is challenging your technical skills and upper body strength.

I have a bike set up with ratcheting cranks that largely gets used for indoor rides on rollers during the winter. From a technique perspective, I have no problem riding with the special cranks – though have to gradually build up my endurance on them as the winter progresses. As PowerCranks are essentially a “simultaneous non-stop one-legged pedaling effort”, would I now be better off riding without the PowerCranks?

Understanding the research on this topic is easier if you think of the acquisition of a new skill in three stages. In the beginner stage your body doesn't know which muscles to fire in what order and how hard to make a particular movement. Movements are jerky and inefficient. In this phase, part practice is very effective. If you were learning to corner a bike for instance, you'd think: shoulders low, outside foot down, hands on the drops, weight on inside hand, head up, eyes where you want to go, push with the toe to get your weight off the saddle, lean the bike... If you do all these things you end up in a decent position for cornering, but you can't corner fast because it takes too long to think through all the parts and get in position. This phase can be frustrating because you are still occasionally forgetting parts of the movement and having to try again to get it right.

In the middle, skill-refinement stage, your body knows what muscles to use and approximately what forces and coordination to apply, but it's not yet automatic. In the cornering example, you do all the things to get in position pretty quickly, but you are still figuring out just how far to lean the bike for different corners, when to start leaning the bike as you enter the corner and when you can start pedaling again. You're cornering much faster than someone who hasn't worked this stuff out, but not as fast as skilled descenders. You're also still very aware of the process and probably absorbed in learning. You feel what you are doing. It's a thrilling phase of learning because you can feel yourself doing better and better as you make small adjustments. Occasionally you make an adjustment in the wrong direction and have to back up again.

Back to the research: The research says that part practice is most effective in the beginner phase where what you are learning is all the parts of a movement. As soon as you get to the middle, skill-refinement stage, whole practice becomes more effective, and the only time to return to part practice is when you need to re-model a skill. That is, if you've been doing something for a while, but doing it badly, you'd want to break it down and then build it up again from good pieces to break the bad habits. This is why run clinics that make people start over from body position or knee-lifting and such can be effective. The simplified way to think of the research results is to say that it has been found that "you get good at what you practice."

If you practice the parts of a movement, you get to be good at making the parts of a movement. If you practice a whole movement, executed smoothly and powerfully, you get to be good at the smooth, powerful execution of the whole movement. So long as you keep thinking of the movement in parts though, you don't get as good as you could at the whole, smooth movement. People who get too hung up on focusing on the parts, doing what they learned in class may arrest their own development in the skill refinement stage, becoming good but not great descenders.

Now, let's look at one-legged pedaling. Compared to the goal performance of smooth, powerful two legged pedaling, one-legged pedaling is a form of part practice. You are separating the full movement into pieces and learning them separately, with special emphasis on the upstroke. If you don't already know how to execute an upstroke, that could be beneficial. If you do, focusing on one legged pedaling is arresting you in the intermediate phase of skill acquisition.

You might like to argue that one-legged pedaling is not about skill acquisition. Rather it is about strength training or aerobic fitness development in the up-stroke muscles, and you'd be right that there could be a role for it there, especially if you are particularly weak in that movement or if those muscles tend to fatigue before others when you ride normally. If those muscles are as strong and have as much endurance as needed to support your riding though, the negative aspects of part practice can start to outweigh the special fitness-endurance benefits.

What does this feel like in real life? I had a pro client train many, many hours on ratcheting cranks one winter, hoping to be suddenly much stronger when the racing season came around. When he started racing, he found that his pulling-up muscles quickly fatigued, not because they weren't strong or aerobically fit, but because riding the ratcheting cranks had taught him to pull up in a way that was perfect when riding ratcheting cranks, but inefficient when riding regular cranks. Once he learned to pedal the two-legged cranks again, he was fine, but not especially stronger than he should have been.

(I've had a look at the website for one brand of ratcheting cranks and seen the many testimonials there. It looks like lots of people avow that they got stronger by using them, but no one has fairly compared how much stronger a group of athletes got using them compared to another group doing the same amount of training not using them. Also, the percentage improvements claimed prove that the riders were not well trained before they started using ratcheting cranks, so large gains would be expected with any sort of higher-volume training.

If ratcheting cranks or any other gizmo or supplement really made already-fit athletes stronger than they could otherwise get, everyone would have to use it or lose. Remember, the differences in strength, watts/kg, endurance etc between the people who win and those come in mid-pack are only a few percent. If a special product made everyone 10% stronger, anyone with mid-pack talent who used it would beat anyone who didn't. )

Thank you for the detailed response. It is interesting that you mention seat height issue. I am addmittedly a bit obsessive about this and bike fit in general. I have read all your work and most others on the subject. Throughout my cycling experience I have experimented with every saddle height formula I could find, but the one I have always started with is the simple "scrape the mud off your heel with the crank in line with the seat tube" method. And then maybe go a few millimeters higher. Of course, shoes and cleat types will vary slightly also. I should mention that I currently wear Specialized Body Geometry road shoes with Look Keos.

You have shorter left leg and I don't know whether you compensate for it or not on a bike because you've given no information about that. You also say that you 'drive my right hip deeper into the pedal stroke'. Doing so will increase the distance the left leg has to reach if you are not rebounding perfectly to a centred position on the seat. I know you say that you don't rock but on a daily basis I see that fit client's self perceptions are usually inaccurate. You may be right about not rocking but if you are sitting with your right hip forward a touch (and this is common) your left leg will have to reach further.

Everything you've said strongly suggests overextension of the left leg. No amount of 'blasting' the 'weaker' left leg in the gym will make any difference. It is only weaker because you are asking to much of it. Either the problem is poor innervation of the left leg, which is unlikely but possible. If that's the case, no amount of gym work will have any effect Instead you will need a good chiropractor or manipulative physiotherapist. OR the problem is overextension which is far more likely.

If overextension then either -
The seat is too high
OR
You lack sufficient compensation for the LLD in form of a shim
OR
You are not sitting as squarely as you think you are on the seat which may in turn be caused by a dominant left cerebellum (right side of body) motor pattern or self protective measures arising from lack of foot correction or too high a seat height.
OR
Any combination of these things.

The amount of aerobic work you undertake will be predicated upon your level of body fat gained over your ideal body composition, your physiological limiters, what type of events you are targeting, and how well you are able to recover. To illustrate this, think of how much less training volume a criterium focused rider who does not tend to gain excess fat, has late summer goals, and less than stellar recovery would undertake than a road racer who tends to gain weight, recover well and wants to race well in the spring. So assess yourself on these fronts and decide how much training you need to undertake.

What I would be most mindful of is making too great a jump in your training load as a result of having more time at your disposal. It sounds counterintuitive, but having more time to train can actually be problematic inasmuch as it allows for the possibility of overtraining. So just as much as you focus on training well, also make certain to be mindful of your sleep, diet, massage, and other habits that will impact your recovery.

Last week (November 23) there was a question on base level training in preparation for the racing season. I'm 19 and in my second year of college in England, I only have 8 week terms which means I have a 6 week holiday over christmas and new year which means I can train a lot. I'm just wondering about what sort of training I should be doing then. You mentioned stress due to high intensity training in the Q&A but I won't be under any stress during the holidays and I can easily fit 12-15 hours of training in a week, how much of this should be higher intensity and how much should be base training?

High intensity training such as competitive group rides and races bring rapid physiological improvement but also an early plateau. Many riders start out doing mainly higher intensity training, make great gains, and then burn out well below their potential. To reach your potential you have to eventually do some training that mostly challenges your aerobic endurance. That is, zone 2 or base training. One proven approach is to do a rest period after the end of one racing season, and then only base until two months before the next racing season.

In the final two months, a high volume of base training is maintained, while two days per week base training is replaced by intervals or other harder work. The first month of transition to racing, the harder work is sub-LT and done in extended chunks, such as three intervals of 15 minutes on/ 5 minutes off at 92-96% of LT heart rate or power. In the final month before the start of racing, the harder work can be shorter intervals right around LT, such as six intervals of 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off at LT minus 3 beats to LT plus three beats, or staying as close as you can to FTP power.

Above is the general plan, but if the time during which you can do unusually large volumes of training happens to fall within the period when it is appropriate to do sub-LT or LT intervals, you should consider how much training volume you have gotten in to that point. When you increase volume by more than a couple of hours per week, you should decrease intensity. So if your inter-term volume will be a lot higher than your previous experience, take a few weeks of base-only riding to adjust to that before starting, or re-starting intervals.

Scott Saifer (www.wenzelcoaching.com) is head coach, CEO of Wenzel Coaching.com and has been coaching cyclists professionally for 18 years. He combines a master's degree in Exercise Physiology with experience in 20 years of touring and racing and over 300 road, track and MTB races to deliver training plans and advice that are both rigorously scientific and compatible with the real world of bike racing.

Steve Hogg has owned and operated Pedal Pushers since 1986, a cycle shop specialising in rider positioning and custom bicycles. In that time he has positioned riders from all cycling disciplines and of all levels of ability with every concievable cycling problem. Clients range from recreational riders and riders with disabilities to World and National champions. He can be reached at: www.stevehoggbikefitting.com

James Hibbard progressed from the junior to the professional ranks as a rider and has over 15 years of competitive cycling experience. He is a former Collegiate All-American track cyclist, trained as a resident athlete at the United States Olympic Training Center, earned international medals as part of the U.S. National Team, and was a member of the powerhouse Shaklee and HealthNet Professional road cycling teams.

Carrie Cheadle, MA (www.carriecheadle.com) is a Sports Psychology consultant who has dedicated her career to helping athletes of all ages and abilities perform to their potential. Carrie specialises in working with cyclists, in disciplines ranging from track racing to mountain biking. She holds a bachelors degree in Psychology from Sonoma State University as well as a masters degree in Sport Psychology from John F. Kennedy University.