TrainerRoad’s Ask a Cycling Coach podcast gives you the chance to get answers to your cycling and triathlon training questions with USAC certified coaches Chad Timmerman, Jonathan Lee and special guests. Check out a few questions we answered in our latest episode with special guest and TrainerRoad CEO, Nate Pearson.
Listen to the Full Episode
How do I become a better climber?
The key to good climbing is your power to weight ratio. As the road turns upward, every gram of weight requires you to put out more power to maintain your speed and especially to get ahead. While many cyclists are labeled as natural climbers, improving your climbing isn’t out of reach for anybody.
The first point to focus on is your weight. Most people have 5-10 pounds to lose at any given moment, and you’d be surprised at how much of a difference that makes.
Sometimes, all it takes to drop this extra weight is a little more discipline when it comes to post-meal desserts, mid-day snacks and post-ride beers. Breaking it down to a simple equation of managing your caloric intake in relation to your caloric expenditure goes a long way when your improving your climbing.
The other side of the equation is power. Once again, the increased grade of the road will place greater importance on your power output than normal.
If the climbs that you will be riding or racing on are steady and long, then you’ll need to focus on building sustained power and muscle endurance. Our Sustained Power Build and Climbing Road Race plans are perfect for building this type of fitness.
Alternatively, if your climbs are short, punchy and varied, then you’ll need to focus on your ability to put out repeated high-power as you’re forced to recover between spikes in elevation. Our General Build and Rolling Road Race plans are designed for these situations.
To hear the coaches’ advice on this topic, listen at 21:26.
Self Coaching vs. Hired Coaching
Choosing to coach yourself or hire a coach is completely up to you. In most cases, self-coached athletes feel they have sufficient structure, knowledge and motivation to do things on their own.
On the contrary, a coached athlete may feel that he is lacking in any one of those three areas.
When it comes to training structure, the most valuable thing to consider is whether you have a training plan that’s tailored to your fitness level and your fitness goals. Most training plans these days follow a generic template. While they may improve your fitness, it’s doubtful that they’ll help realize your full cycling potential.
So, what kind of training plan allows you to reach your potential? One that’s structured to your personal fitness and one that changes as you get stronger. The knowledge required to create the this kind of structured plan also brings benefits in interpreting what your training data means and how to react.
Plenty of athletes use power meters to collect data from their training. It’s knowing what that data means and what decisions you should make where the real value of it all comes into play.
Circumstances will always require somebody to alter their training plan in some way, so knowing how to do so is key. Having said that, this knowledge can be learned.
Finally, you need motivation. More specifically, you need the motivation to push yourself to and well beyond your limits as you move towards your goal. This is perhaps the most important part of successful self-training.
On their own, a well-designed structured training plan and the knowledge to make the right decisions won’t make you faster. The effort and sacrifices that you make to become a better athlete will be the leaven to raise your performance to new heights. Doing this day-in and day-out is physically, mentally and emotionally taxing. Having a mentor, friend and confidant will help get you through these dark days.
When considering these three points, remember that TrainerRoad can be the perfect tool for either of these scenarios. Your coach can use our workouts and training plans, or he can create his own. That coach can then assign those workouts to you, analyze your performance and communicate with you through our Teams feature.
If you are self-coached, we provide the structure and knowledge with our app, workouts, training plans that you’ll need to succeed. We also provide educational content, on-screen text, workout and training plan summaries and a responsive and knowledgable coaching and customer support staff that is always available to help you make decisions and motivate you.
To hear the coaches’ advice on this topic, listen at 24:46.
How long of a break should I take during the off season?
The short answer for this is 2-4 weeks — but as in almost every case, this depends on each person’s situation. It’s important to know that it doesn’t take long for you to lose your hard-earned fitness.
If you take four weeks off the bike, for example, you should expect to lose a noticeable amount of fitness. If you take a week or two off, you should be able to maintain most of your fitness.
Perhaps more important than timing is the quality and type of rest that you are taking during this time. If you feel like you need a break from training, try to understand your motivation. Are you physically worn out, mentally fatigued or emotionally empty? Make sure that your time off allows you to recharge the right batteries.
If you are physically spent, it’s pretty straight forward: don’t train and reduce your physical activity as much as possible. If you are mentally fatigued, take time away from cycling in general and focus on different aspects of your life that you may have neglected during the season. If you’re emotionally empty, try taking easy rides with no clear objective in places that you love.
Rekindling your love for riding a bike goes a long way to improve motivation over time. Not to mention, it will probably make you faster too.
To hear the coaches’ advice on this topic, listen at 37:13.
Additional Notes
We answered a lot of questions in this week’s Ask a Cycling Coach podcast. You can learn more about these topics with our resources below:
- How to incorporate weekend rides into a training plan
- How to adjust your training if you’re feeling tired
- Which training plans to follow for multiple peaks
- Why your threshold heart rate is different when running and cycling
- Fast and slow twitch muscle fibers and long term changes
- How to train for an Olympic distance Triathlon
- How to adjust your training during recovery from an injury
- Back-to-back build plans
- How to train for Race Across America (RAAM)
- What to do in between training blocks
- How to use cyclocross as cross training
- How to train for a Sportive or Gran Fondo
- How to lose weight and manage Caloric deficits with cycling
- How to pick a training plan and how power-to-weight ratios affect this
- How to manage overuse knee injuries for cyclists
If you have a question that you’d like to ask Coach Chad, submit your question here. We’ll do our best to answer them on the next episode of the Ask a Cycling Coach podcast.
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Some of us are on the 0-dark-thirty schedule, because hey – most of us are just doing this to have fun. For days with a higher intensity workout (e.g. VO2), how do we handle pre-workout nutrition given we’re already up super early? What are some suggestions to consume within 30 minutes of these harder workouts, to sufficiently fuel the workout?
Chad will have some great insight on this one Don. Actually, we both train this way the majority of the time, so we’ll be able to provide plenty of info and insight in this Friday’s podcast. I’ve put this question in our queue.
Here’s the registration link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4895110798781366274
Hi Don,
Apologies for not addressing this during this week’s podcast. But Jonathan is correct as I’ve been training this way for about 10 years now by doing most of my hard interval workouts straight out of bed.
You have a couple options, and each will take a bit of testing on your part, but they boil down to training in a fasted state, ingesting some quick carbs like 10oz of sports drink or eating a banana, or rising really early to take in some slower-digesting carbohydrates like oatmeal or a PB&J sandwich.
I’m only going to focus on the first option since it’s worked for years for me as well as literally hundreds of early-rising athletes I’ve coached during indoor power-based workouts.
When you wake up following an overnight fast, your liver glycogen is all but depleted but your muscles typically have anywhere from 50-70 minutes (give or take) of intermuscular sugar on board. This is almost always enough to get you productively through a 60-minute interval session considering the workload seldom exceeds 30 minutes of higher-intensity effort over the course of an hour-long workout. And it just so happens that most of the VO2max or Anaerobic workouts in our catalog are formulated to get you on & off the bike relatively quickly when the intensity gets up into these levels, in part, for this very reason.
There’s also some metabolic benefits that come with training in a fasted state, and whether or not your goals include increased fat metabolism and perhaps fat loss, these benefits are conferred whether you chase them or not.
But if a quick snack is necessary to keep you feeling as productive as possible, perhaps when your workout is closer to 90 minutes than 60, just try to keep your food/drink selections (whether pre-workout or mid-workout) low on the protein, probably void of fat, and easily digestible such that you aren’t coughing it up when your lungs start to tickle the back of your throat. 😉
I really enjoy trainerroad.
However, when it comes to mixing the trainer workout with road rides.
And, I’m looking to get faster, currently my average speed is 20 to 21 mph on some group rides.
But, I want to get up to 24 mph while riding alone.
What can I do?
My current training goes like this: sun- 58 miles in 3:00, mon-off, tue-45 minutes of vo2, wed- easy 1 hour spin,Thur.- 45 minutes of vo2 intervals, fri.-off, sat.- 60 mile group ride.
What do you think?
Hey Travis,
I’ll put this one on the list for this Friday’s show. Here’s the link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4895110798781366274
Hi Travis,
Glad to hear you’re a fan of ours!
So the first thing that strikes me about your training approach is that your goals revolves around increasing your strength endurance, i.e. pushing the pedals harder for long periods of time, but I don’t see any workouts aimed at this particular performance objective unless your group rides incorporate some long efforts very near your FTP.
Improving strength endurance has 2 components: 1) strength (or force) which is how hard you can drive the pedals and 2) endurance which measures just how long you can drive the pedals.
And while you can (and often should) address each individually, at some point you have to focus on doing both at once. Improving both at once is usually done at power outputs in the Sweet Spot & Threshold power zones, and we have a whole slew of plans that put strength endurance at the point of highest importance.
I recommend starting with the Sweet Spot Base plans, moving on to the Sustained Power Build and then choosing a Specialty plan that aligns with your most important events or discipline, e.g. Rolling Road Race.
As far as your outdoor rides, you can either use a power meter and simulate your indoor workouts outdoors, or in the absence of a power meter, use your perceived exertion to guide you since your indoor workouts will gradually help you associate perceived levels of exertion (how you feel) with actual power output. Given a little time & experience, you’ll start to learn, based on feeling alone, what Sweet Spot feels like; what Threshold feels like; what VO2max feels like outdoors.
Then it’s a matter of prioritizing your workout above that of the rest of the group. This could mean time trialing off the front of the group to do a VO2max interval, or perhaps slipping off the back of the group to do a Sweet Spot effort. In any case, make your workout the focus of your ride and rejoin the group in between intervals so you can find that balance between keeping your training on track and riding with your buddies from time to time.
Excellent podcast guys!
As a long course triathlete I do all of my A-races in aero position and this is the area I want to be good at as a cyclist. Last season I did pretty much all my Trainerroad workouts in an upright position. The reason being that I was able to produce more watts (+20 watts) compared to aero. Also, I could not complete any of the workouts in aero as I did my FTP test in upright position and thus the goals of the workouts were just too high for me.
Would it make more sense to do all my Trainerroad FTP tests (lower result) and all training sessions in an aero position and have less watts or should I aim to dish out the maximum wattage, thus riding in upright position?
That’s a good one Henry. A lot of people either already have or will have this question. It’s on our list of questions to answer this Friday. Here’s the registration link for this week’s podcast: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4895110798781366274
Hi Henry,
Glad you enjoyed the podcast! Three things to note here:
1) FTP is FTP, and what I mean is, it’s basically the highest measure of what your body can do for the test durations, e.g. 20 minutes or 8 minutes; which is then reduced to estimate what you could do for longer durations closer to an hour. So you only cheat this measure by doing it in a less-than-optimal position like your aero position. So test in whichever position yields the best result.
2) Aero athletes – and we all qualify to some extent – need to adapt their power to those positions they’ll use in competition. So in your case, you have to learn where to balance your power output with your aero position. This can be accomplished through practice, fit manipulations & often enough, flexibility training. So anything that works against your efforts to sustain a race pace that is within your fitness capabilities has to be addressed via one or more of these aspects.
3) Conditioning is either position-independent or position-related. In the case of the former, the goal is stressing a particular energy system or taxing the muscles in a particular way and thus should be done in whichever position yields the target wattage, VO2max intervals spring to mind. In the case of position-related work, this ties back to point 2 where you have to figure out where the balance between position on the bike and working to your full capabilities lies.
So in your case, I’d recommend doing the harder work (>95% FTP) sitting upright, the easier work (all the way up through Sweet Spot) in your aero position, and working up to a point where you can do your goal/race power in your aero position. For full-distance triathletes, this might only be 80% FTP, for 40k time trialists, this will be right around FTP, and for criterium riders, this could actually include doing some VO2max & sustained, suprathreshold efforts in the drops
Hi guy really enjoying your podcast.
I’m out in chicago and have been racing crits/road for the past four years and this has been my first year riding with power. For the upcoming season I’m planning on track racing and doing some crits — crit season starts at the beginning of august and track starts in mid may. After base phases I was considering doing the short power build and crit specialty but will this leave me hanging on the track?
Also, one of my friends coaches has been doing a 2min and 3min ftp test. Why have you guys chosen the 8 min test over those?
Hi Jake,
Currently, the Criterium training plan will be one of your best bets when it comes to the demands of track racing, but take a look at the Gravity plans in our Off-Road Plans as these might be an even closer fit. I have every intention of formulating some track-specific training plans at some point this season but I’m not sure just how specific I’ll get. There will be at least one set of Endurance training plans (low-, mid- & high-volume) and a set of Sprint plans as well.
As far as our use of the 8-minute & 20-minute assessment protocols, our aim is to get an estimate of your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) in order to lend structure to every subsequent workout as well as to monitor progress. We have to anchor our workouts & plans on some point, and FTP is pretty common ground amongst those who train with power.
This certainly isn’t to say that it’s the only training basis, and as your training grows increasingly specific it’s an excellent idea to tailor your assessments to the highly specific demands of your events. In your case, I’d recommend tracking FTP as well as the shorter durations like 2 & 3-minute power if those are of particular importance.
What gets measured gets managed, right? So measure those specific power durations whenever possible so you can determine whichever training plan you utilize is giving you the improvements necessary to excel in your most important performance niches. If not, don’t hesitate to tailor your workouts – something your coach can do quickly using our Custom Workout Creator – to better fit your personal needs.