Distinguishing yourself as a cyclist requires purposeful training that sets you apart from the rest. The foundation of purposeful training lies in having a compelling goal for your upcoming racing season. To kickstart your journey towards this goal, it’s crucial to conduct a personal assessment. Take stock of your current position both physically and mentally, comparing it to where you aspire to be. Do you possess the necessary tools to gauge your progress effectively? You will be guided through all of these points when you start the self coaching course.
This post will delve into the physical markers of fitness that play a significant role in defining endurance performance. By comprehending the fundamentals of ability-based training, you’ll gain insight into how to enhance your fitness effectively.
We also focuses on purposeful training by identifying the obstacles, or “limiters,” that hinder your goal attainment. Understanding your limiters in relation to your abilities sets the stage for purpose-driven training. Embracing this concept is pivotal to your training’s efficacy and ultimate success.
The decisions you make while absorbing the knowledge presented in the upcoming chapters will infuse purpose into your workouts and propel you towards achieving your goals.
Embarking on a New Season
The start of a new cycling season carries greater significance. Even though you may not be focused on building substantial fitness just yet, this phase entails crucial decision-making and completion of essential tasks that shape your training’s quality and subsequent benefits for the rest of the year. The start-up process outlined in this post is so pivotal to the season’s outcome that I encourage athletes to follow it every year when they resume training.
Consider each activity mentioned here as more than mere suggestions. They hold as much importance as your on-bike training, contributing significantly to your race preparation and performance. It may be tempting to overlook some of these tasks due to their seemingly trivial nature. However, accomplishing these small yet meaningful steps can make a notable difference, and the start of your season often holds the key to your success.
What if you come across this post when the season is already underway? Perhaps you are well into your training, and there are eight weeks remaining until your next important race. In such a scenario, I strongly recommend restarting your season by following the guidelines outlined here. While it may require some time to incorporate these steps, they will not significantly interfere with your race preparation. Consider it time well spent. On the other hand, if you find yourself in the midst of your race season, it’s advisable to postpone the suggested start-up procedures until you have a break of several weeks before your next high-priority race.
Training Tools for Optimal Performance
Undoubtedly, riding a high-quality bike with fast wheels, smooth gear changes, and responsive brakes can enhance your training and racing experience. It’s apparent that these factors contribute to improved performance. Similarly, certain training tools have the potential to elevate your performance to a higher level. I advocate for the use of two essential tools by all the athletes I coach: a heart rate monitor and a power meter. These tools provide accurate data, which is crucial for making informed training decisions. As the saying goes, “That which is measured improves.” Heart rate monitors and power meters precisely measure your performance during rides, providing insights into how your engine is running. Without them, you would be left guessing about the state of your engine.
While cycling is undoubtedly an expensive sport, investing in training equipment like heart rate monitors and power meters is worth considering. The cost of a heart rate monitor is relatively affordable, and power meter prices continue to drop steadily. You don’t necessarily need the most expensive power meter; even the more economical options can reliably provide intensity measurement, which is the most critical aspect. If you’re on a tight budget, explore options such as used equipment available through bike shops or cycling clubs. Many athletes upgrade their technology at the beginning of the season and sell their well-functioning older devices. Therefore, you can still acquire suitable equipment without breaking the bank.
It’s important to note that heart rate monitors and power meters are not magical solutions. You must invest time in learning how to use them effectively. the self coaching coarse will provide you with a starting point, and will also delve deeper into data analysis nuances. Having a knowledgeable coach will also greatly facilitate your understanding and utilization of this technology.
Beyond learning how to use these tools, it’s essential to address other considerations, including safety. While it can be enticing to focus solely on the numerical data provided by your devices, it’s crucial to maintain situational awareness, particularly when riding in traffic. Looking at your handlebar device while navigating traffic poses risks to your safety. Additionally, becoming overly fixated on numbers can diminish your connection with your body’s natural feel. As discussed in the post, ” Training Intensity“, perceiving exertion accurately is vital for racing. Watching numbers change during a race is not the path to success; instead, you must remain attuned to your body. Heart rate monitors and power meters serve to improve your training by providing precise measurements and enabling you to adjust intensity effectively. Ultimately, your intuition and feel for racing remain paramount.
Seasonal Goals
Once you have the essential tools for serious training, the next step is to define your goals for the season. It could be a single goal, such as achieving a podium finish at the national championship. If you have come close to this accomplishment in the past and have been dreaming about it, now is the time to turn that dream into a concrete goal. However, turning a dream into a goal requires more than just desire; it requires a plan. In the self coaching coarse, we will address the process of planning to achieve your goals.
Alternatively, you may have multiple goals for the upcoming season. In that case, I recommend limiting yourself to three primary goals. As the number of goals increases, it becomes more challenging to manage all the different components required for training and achieving them. Moreover, multiple goals can sometimes be contradictory. For example, if your goal is to podium in a series of cyclocross races while also setting a personal best in a 30 km time trial during the same period, there may be a conflict in training requirements. Training for cyclocross and time trials demands different physiological adaptations, making it difficult to fully excel in both simultaneously. Therefore, it is best to focus on one goal at a time and space them out adequately throughout the season.
When setting your goals, keep a few guidelines in mind. Your goals should be specific, measurable, challenging yet attainable, relevant, and have a definite timeline. Regularly reviewing your progress is essential. While these guidelines may seem obvious, let’s focus on a couple that often require clarification.
Consistent with the coaching philosophy of “that which is measured improves,” accurately measuring progress toward your goals is crucial. A goal like “breaking the one-hour mark for a 40 km time trial on July 10” is specific, measurable, and time-bound. You can easily track your progress toward achieving it. On the other hand, a goal like “ride faster this year” is too vague to be measurable. What defines faster? For what duration? When? It becomes challenging to gauge progress toward such a goal. Although it may sound appealing at first, it lacks value and fails to provide a meaningful focus for the season. Setting goals without measurable parameters is a common mistake in sports.
Another pitfall is setting unrealistic goals. For instance, a novice cyclist aiming to “win the masters national road race on June 2” may have a specific and measurable goal, but it is likely far from achievable at this stage. While it could become a reality in the future, right now, it remains more of a dream. Setting excessively ambitious goals without a realistic path to achieving them can be demotivating and undermine the purpose of training.
Conversely, goals that are too easy fail to challenge you. If success is almost guaranteed, the goal lacks the necessary motivation to drive you forward. Training without a challenging goal results in purposeless efforts and empty outcomes. Your goals should push you just beyond your current capabilities, demanding growth and development as a competitive cyclist.
Training Objectives
When you set a challenging yet realistic goal, the question arises: Why can’t you achieve it now? If you could already achieve it easily at this point in the season, it would be an accomplishment rather than a goal. There would be no sense of achievement, no challenge, and it would not be particularly significant. The fact that there is doubt about achieving the goal indicates a missing element, which I refer to as a “limiter.” The primary purpose of your training is to address and overcome these performance limiters. The sub-goals that define the necessary steps to overcome your limiters are known as training objectives.
For now, it is crucial to understand that a training objective represents a short-term goal that you need to accomplish during your race preparation to fix a limiter and ultimately achieve your seasonal goal. These objectives are often achieved within specific workouts. If the objective can be measured in some way, it adds even more value.
For example, an objective could be achieving a specific power output for a given duration in training or a test, indicating an improvement in your functional threshold power (FTP) needed to race at a higher level. Objectives may also address lifestyle factors or mental barriers that hinder your performance.
So far, we have established a seasonal goal accompanied by training objectives, which are the necessary steps to overcome your limiters and achieve the goal. Now we move to the most granular level of high-performance training: daily purposes.
Daily Purposes
If your goal is genuinely challenging, it will require determination, hard work, and patience to address your limiters effectively. You need to work on them every day in some capacity. This persistent dedication is what ultimately leads to goal achievement. Each workout must serve a purpose; random workouts with the hope that something positive will happen will not suffice. Every workout, every day, must focus on something that enhances your race readiness or contributes to your progress. It could be a demanding task such as improving power or developing endurance, or it could be a less demanding workout like an easy recovery ride or a rest day to allow your body to adapt and become stronger. Patience is crucial in training, as it is during recovery periods that your body undergoes adaptation and gains strength. This emphasis on daily purpose is essential for achieving challenging goals.
Purposeful training ensures small daily gains that cumulatively lead to accomplishing your seasonal goals. As your goals become more ambitious, every decision you make in your daily life becomes more important, even when you are not on the bike. This includes choices related to nutrition, sleep duration, training partners, and even your mindset. Everything matters when aiming for high goals. Such demanding goals require your complete focus and dedication in all aspects of life.
If you find yourself at the start of a new training year, I hope you have been contemplating the upcoming season and envisioning what you want to achieve. What are your aspirations and dreams? It is from these dreams that your goals, objectives, and daily purposes will emerge. In the self coaching coarse, I will guide you through the process of finding your seasonal goal and supporting objectives. We will then delve into daily purposes of how to plan a training week effectively.
Assessment Time!
If you are reading this at the beginning of the new season, you are likely feeling fresh and eager to start training. However, it is important to approach the restart of serious training correctly. Training too aggressively at this stage often leads to burnout, and riders who peak too early, often referred to as “Christmas stars.”
Returning to training properly involves a couple of stages. The first stage is assessing your current status. Ask yourself, “Physically and mentally, where am I now?” The answer comprises three aspects: physical readiness for training, mental preparedness to pursue high goals, and your current cycling fitness level.
Let’s explore how I approach assessing the athlete’s physical, mental, and fitness status. I strongly recommend following this process diligently within the first four weeks of your return to training for the new season. Your race performance for the year ahead will greatly benefit from this assessment.
Physical Assessment and Bike Fit
As a cycling coach, I strongly recommend including a physical therapist specializing in endurance athletes, particularly cyclists, in your high-performance team. Scheduling a physical assessment with a therapist at the start of the season is crucial for injury prevention and optimizing bike fit. These two components of the early season process go hand in hand.
During the physical assessment, the therapist will conduct a comprehensive examination, assessing your posture, strength, joint range of motion, muscular balance, dynamic function, and any structural peculiarities or asymmetries that may impact your physical health and training consistency. The purpose is to identify any specific risks for injury and address them to prevent breakdowns during the upcoming season. The information gathered during the assessment will also aid the bike fitter in ensuring that your bike setup aligns with your body, optimizing performance and minimizing the risk of injury.
If the physical therapist identifies any risks associated with your unique physical characteristics, they should design a corrective exercise program that includes strengthening and mobility exercises tailored to your needs. You can also ask the therapist for equipment and bike position recommendations to pass along to your bike fitter. They may provide guidance to you and your coach, if applicable, regarding the types of workouts that will be structurally beneficial and exercises to avoid, at least until the necessary physical corrections have been made.
Following the therapist’s injury prevention program is equally important as your bike workouts. It is crucial to prioritize and diligently follow the exercises prescribed by the therapist. A physical therapist experienced in working with endurance athletes understands the constraints of limited training time and will streamline the corrective exercise program to ensure optimal benefits within a reasonable time frame. In case of severe structural weaknesses, it is advisable to schedule a follow-up exam to assess progress and make any necessary adjustments to the exercise routine. A thorough physical assessment that addresses injury risk is often the difference between a successful race season and a frustrating one.
If getting a physical therapist is not in the budget then I am creating the next best thing, which is a video sequence of finding your mobility limiters and work correcting then. This will be included in the self coaching subscription fee.
After the physical assessment, it is highly recommended to seek the expertise of a professional bike fitter to ensure your bicycle is set up correctly. I have witnessed riders increase their functional threshold power (FTP) by more than 10 percent simply by having their bikes adjusted to their bodies, even when they initially believed their position on the bike was perfect and required no modifications. Every rider tends to think their position is optimal, but a professional bike fit can make a substantial difference. Do not skip this step; it is vital for your performance.
And again, for those who simply cant stretch to budget for this then I will have ways for you to get as close as possible by following guidelines that I will have within my self coaching platform. I must stress here that this will not replace what you can get from visiting a professional bike fitter but it should get you close if followed correctly.
If you do have the money then it is advisable to have a bike fit every season, even if you are riding the same bike that was properly fitted in the previous season. Various factors can change over time, such as changes in muscle strength, flexibility, mass, and range of motion due to aging, strength training, and alterations in training workload. Additionally, you may have made modifications to your bike setup, such as changing the saddle, handlebar stem, pedals, shoes, or other components. Furthermore, if you have different bikes for road and time trial disciplines, both should be properly fitted. A professional bike fit adjustment is necessary if you genuinely want to race at your full potential.
The best professional cycling teams worldwide prioritize physical assessments and bike fits for their riders at the beginning of each season because they understand the critical role these factors play in their success. They are no less important for individual cyclists.
Mental Assessment
In addition to physical readiness, mental readiness is crucial for racing success and achieving your goals as an athlete. As discussed in “Unleashing the Mental Edge To Achieve High Performance in Cycling“, mental fitness is essential for high performance. Therefore, at the start of a new season, it is important to assess your mental readiness.
The Mental Skills Assessment in that you will have access to on the self coaching platform, will help you evaluate your mental strengths and weaknesses. It is essential to be completely honest while answering each question, as only you will see the results (unless you choose to share them). There is no reason to embellish your true feelings.
Now let’s analyze your Mental Skills Assessment ratings. Given that you are reading this post, it is likely that your motivation score is high (4 or 5). Serious athletes tend to be highly motivated individuals, at least in terms of their sport. While high motivation is generally considered positive, it can have a downside.
Some athletes struggle to reduce training volume for adequate rest or fail to taper appropriately before important races due to their unwavering motivation. Such individuals often require a coach to rein them in. I have encountered self-coached athletes who, driven by their motivation, avoid rest and recovery unless forced to incorporate them due to overwhelming fatigue.
This mindset often leads to overtraining. Unfortunately, only a few athletes truly comprehend the devastating consequences of overtraining. We will delve into this topic further in my post “Training Stress“. It is crucial to manage your enthusiasm for training and high achievement to race at the highest possible level.
Confidence, thought habits, ability to focus, and visualization skills also play significant roles in training and racing. A low score (1, 2, or 3) in any of these categories suggests a need for improvement in that specific mental skill. Working with a sports psychologist is the most effective, albeit costly, approach to enhance these mental skills. Another option is to seek a coach who possesses a solid understanding of the mental aspects of sports. If that is not feasible, reading books written by sports psychologists can provide valuable insights. These books are among the list of recommended reading list on the self coaching platform.
This is the end of the self coaching theory. If you’re ready to start getting into the practical end of training the try out my self coaching platform here. If you have just come across this post then I recommend starting again here and go through all the stuff you need to know to help you train smarter.