Knowing the importance of having purpose for our training, and that no one wants to spend time doing something and have nothing to show for it, we must test ourselves and then validate our training programs and techniques. This chapter will discuss the assessments you need to incorporate in your power training program, and how to interpret the results.Read more…
Even if we don’t understand slow twitch from fast twitch to nose twitch, the muscle fiber mixes we are born will inevitably guide us towards riding or racing that takes advantage of our strengths, and minimizes the drawbacks of our weaknesses. We are encouraged by what we do best and thus we continue to build on it. Add a little training that continues to improve on our strengths, and some desire to achieve objectives with those strengths, and now we will begin to see specific rider types emerge in a way that can actually be quantified to help with both prescribing training as well as understanding just how variable power is from one individual to another.Read more…
I am a big proponent of using all of the tools at your disposal, so the idea of training without a heart monitor just leaves too much information on the table. Why handicap yourself for something that is both easy and relatively inexpensive to measure? More to the point, heart rate should be seen as what it ‘costs you’ to generate a specific power level and sustain that level. Read more…
Maybe a better title for this chapter would have been ‘What’s It All Mean?’ This is really the bottom line, after all. If we are going to research the best power bikes to buy, learn how to use the power consoles, perform heart zone and power zones baseline tests, we need to know how to understand the data that flows from all this work. Since this chapter is a bit long, we’ve broken it into two posts.Read more…
Knowing what power is, the question becomes: how do we measure it? This chapter explains the origin of power meters on bicycles, how strain gauges work and where they are placed on the bikes and how the indoor cycling industry has been able to get into the market as technology changed and costs came down.Read more…
Chapter 3 of Gene Nacey of Cycling Fusion’s e-book Power Training. This chapter discusses your limiters. A limiter is a physiological, mechanical, environmental or other circumstance that constrains or ‘limits’ performance. Put in terms of power, we would say that there are a variety of factors that can limit how much power we can produce. Read more…
This profile combines what you work on in high-cadence drills with high-resistance climbing efforts, creating a very effective (and hard) training session. Please don’t take it personally if your students take your name in vain after this class; I assure you, they’ll thank you later when they realize how much you improve their fitness and power with very targeted profiles like these.Read more…