Innehållsförteckning för Road Cyclists Training Manual 2016 från Cycling Plus

Come winter you could just put your feet up and arrive at the start of the new season slower on the bike. But if you want to improve on your performances next season, now is the time to set your goals in motion by building up a good base fitness. It’s not the most appealing time of year for churning out the miles but that’s where a turbo trainer comes in handy. Static riding is ideal for focussed sessions and the perfect opportunity to assess your bike position and improve your pedalling efficiency. Winter is also a great time to work on aspects of your cycling away from the bike such as your strength and conditioning.…

The sun is putting in more regular appearances, daylight hours are increasing, and with a good base fitness gained over winter, it’s time to start really focusing your training and stepping up the intensity of your workouts. While you may not be at full fitness yet, the cycling calendar is starting to fill with sportives, which can make ideal warm-ups towards your goal event. It’s also a great time to work on your cycling skills and bike handling, start using a power meter and, if you’re thinking about competing, getting ready to enter your first race.…

André Greipel Sprint finish RACE Tour Down Under 2014 – Stage 6 Distance: 85.5km Terrain: flat DOB 16/07/1982 BIRTH PLACE Rostock, East Germany HEIGHT 184cm WEIGHT 82kg Power meters measure something that can’t be determined from heart rate – performance CHRIS HOY COULD hit around 2000. Mark Cavendish reaches 1500. Bradley Wiggins averages 476 and yours truly managed 187 recently. These numbers are watts – the measure of the force, or power, that we cyclists put through our cranks when we ride. On their own the numbers I’ve quoted don’t tell much of a story. Hoy and Cav’s big figures are their estimated maximum watts during all-out sprints – Hoy’s after a few laps of the track, the Manx Missile’s during the dash for the line after five hours or…

You’ve thought about it, watched the pros on TV and wondered how you would get on, so what’s holding you back? After a decade in the wilderness, cycle racing is on the up in the UK. More and more purpose-built circuits are emerging, and even the once endangered road race is making a comeback. The opportunities to race are there like never before, so what stops those of us who don’t race, but would like to, from taking the plunge? Watching the fast-moving bunch sweep around the circuit at Hillingdon in London, packed together in close proximity, it’s possible to understand the reticence of reluctant newbies to throw themselves into the deep end. It’s also all too easy to have your eye caught by several thousand pounds’ worth of carbon…

It’s only now, four years on, that I really feel okay to talk about my crash,” says endurance cyclist Scott Forbes, 39. A triathlete since his teens, injury meant Scott missed out on representing Team GB at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Instead he kept up his passion for cycling, competing at an amateur level in races around the world. Then, on a cold November morning in 2012, he was riding through the country lanes near his home in Hampshire. “I was going downhill, fast, when a pedestrian just stepped out in front of me,” explains Scott. “We both tried to swerve but I clipped her back with my handlebars. The wheel locked. I didn’t touch the ground from the moment I went over the handlebars until I piled head…

OUR EXPERTS Jack Pullar – National Hill Climb Champion 2012 James Gullen – National Hill Climb runner-up 2013 Rob Gough – Catford Hill Climb winner 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Peter Giddings – Rob Gough’s coach, www.honed-coaching.com You know you’re working at the right level if you can only manage three to six full-on efforts of at most three minutes each TRAINING TIPS “Preparing for hill climbs is about learning to squeeze every last bit of speed from whatever fitness you have built up over the summer,” explains Honed Coaching’s Peter Giddings. “In the few weeks until the uphillonly season starts you can’t get dramatically fitter but you can definitely train yourself to make full use of what you have already. Happily, that process needs only one or two really high…

WINTER Winter is the hardest time of year to motivate yourself into getting on your bike. Cold and dark mornings and evenings make it much more attractive to stay in bed for an extra hour before work or to curl up cosily on the sofa watching a film at the weekends. And that’s before we even mention the party season that can take its toll on your waistline, liver and general fitness. Muck and ice, which make the roads more dangerous, are also ready-made excuses for staying in. But what you do in the winter can be crucial – riding regularly will help you consolidate the progress you have made in the warmer months and give you a head start when the season gets underway in the spring. EVENTS WINTER…

With shorter days and colder temperatures, it’s only natural that your body wants to do less during winter, but give in and you’ll ruin all the hard work of last summer and leave yourself a weight-loss and fitness mountain to re-climb in the spring. The key is to start the journey towards your new-season goals now, and remember: if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards… ALPINE SPORTIVE Rides of 100 miles plus, like the Etape du Tour, Marmotte or any of their tough, popular UK cousins, are challenging all-day endurance events that require a considerable investment of time and effort to get fit for. We’re talking months, not weeks. For this reason, and because these events are often the pinnacle of a whole season, it’s important to plan other stepping…

TRY THIS… Training to increase your lactate threshold, or the point where lactic acid accumulates in the blood and decreases performance, will improve your TT abilities. Twice a week, ride on the turbo for 2 x 20mins at 90 per cent threshold (power or heart rate), with a two-minute rest in between. Apart from physical training, Jones credits learning about how “absolutely crucial” good aerodynamics are for success in his sport. “It led me into the wind tunnel and finding out I could go a lot faster for the same power,” he says. 1 USE AGE TO YOUR ADVANTAGE REINVENTION CAN COME about simply through the passing of time, and the progression of young road racer to older time triallist is a well-beaten path. Former BikeRadar.com editor Jeff Jones, 43,…

This is the time of year cyclists look forward to the most. Long, sunny (hopefully) days, sportives every weekend, time trials and races by the score, or just the pleasure of cycling day after day, enjoying the gentle thrum of rubber on tarmac and working on those tan lines. Being the peak of the cycling season you shouldn’t be doing much training at this time, as your base fitness should’ve been taken care of during winter and spring. Instead, get out there and make the most of all those cycling opportunities and benefit from the hard work you put in during the previous six months to achieve your newseason goals.…

The days are drawing in and leaves are turning from green to brown under darker, more menacing skies. But while traditionally autumn is a time to take a break from the bike it can also be a time of plenty for the adventurous rider. Beside a number of late-season sportives to choose from, there’s the ever-popular hill climb, and it’s also the start of the cyclocross season, so you don’t have to put your bike away just yet. If, however, you prefer some time out of the saddle, it’s the perfect opportunity to address any aches and pains, and start to assess how you can become an even better cyclist next year.…

The race format is perfect for hanging on to summer fitness. It’s also a rigorous all-body workout 1 Crossing the ages In the words of pioneering French Grand Tour cyclist Eugène Christophe, from an article that appeared in Le Miroir des Sports newspaper in 1921, “The first advantage of cyclocross is to teach its participants bike handling.” He complained of his contemporaries: “They are not familiarised with their machine; do not know how to carry it or put it down and always seem in fear of damaging it or getting caught up in it.” If they had ridden cyclocross, he claims, this would have been different. The other reason for racing cyclocross hasn’t changed since 1921 either: winter fitness. The short, intense race format is perfect for hanging on to…

Better pedalling A smooth, rounded pedalling action where you apply constant and even force throughout the stroke is not just elegant to look at – coining the fancy French term souplesse – it’s also ideal mechanically. “Unfortunately, it’s impossible,” says biomechanist and physiotherapist Dr Andy Kerr from the University of Strathclyde, who also runs cycling assessments at Glasgow’s Physiologix Physio Clinic. “For theoretical maximum mechanical efficiency, force would need to be applied at 90 degrees to the crank throughout its whole rotation – and the human body just can’t do that.” No matter how smooth your pedalling looks, the most powerful part of each foot’s stroke will be just past 90 degrees on the downstroke – just after the ‘three o’clock’ position. This is where the most powerful movers in…

YOU’VE HEARD OF yoga, you’ve heard that top pro cyclists use it and, if you’ve ever had a bike fit, you’ll know what an important role flexibility and symmetry play on your bike. You’ll have an even better idea if you remain hunched over for 10 minutes after a long ride. But when touching your toes seems an unachievable dream, and sitting down cross-legged a distant memory from primary school, then contorting yourself into the sorts of poses typically seen in yoga manuals is highly unappealing and more likely to do harm than good. But inflexibility is not inevitable, and yoga is a progressive exercise so there’s no need to throw yourself in at the deep end anyway. Even some gentle stretching will get you started, but then there are…

Weaving in and out of a series of cones on the ground, it seems Oscar Saiz, barely 10 minutes into our session, has already worked me out. “I can see that you’re a cautious guy, John.” As far as descending and I go, cautious just about covers it. It’s one of the reasons I’m here, after all, to see if this former downhill mountain bike racer can help me improve my technique and free me from the shackles that hold me back. ‘Here’, however, isn’t a corkscrew mountain pass in the Pyrenees but a Carrefour supermarket car park in the city of Terrassa, north east Spain. An unusual location to learn descending techniques? Not at all. It’s this stripped-back starting point that allows Oscar to evaluate a rider’s skill level.…

Have you ever felt completely flat? Not just knackered following an intense training block, but that complete, deep-in-your-bones creeping exhaustion? So tired you couldn’t sleep properly, think straight or summon energy for a ride? You might have told yourself to buck up. It was just a little bit of tiredness. And once you’d finished preparing for that important meeting you might have gone out training anyway. Why lose the edge just because you’re feeling a bit fatigued? But when you did open the taps again, was there anything there? Did you feel refreshed, or did that painful slow ember burn return to your muscles? Did your heart rate stay stubbornly low? Did you start but never complete your intervals? Maybe you were grumpy and had a cold too. If this…

With our GPS computer reading our speed, distance, cadence, heart rate, power, pedalling efficiency and more, live-linking all that information to social networks and online training programmes, while our smartphones sit in our back pockets just an app download away from becoming even more powerful than the computer on our handlebar, we’ve never had it so good when it comes to being informed about our cycling. But is there such a thing as too much information? Perhaps not, if you have a team of analysts working to fine-tune your training programme on a daily basis. But assuming you’re not a principal rider at Team Sky, is there a danger we could get lost in the fog and crushed by the weight of all those numbers? If so, how do we…

1 GET TESTED If you want to improve, then it helps to know what level you are at now. As one season winds down it can be a perfect time to get a benchmark of your fitness so you will know where, and by how much, you improve throughout the year. Adam Holbrook of the Wilier Performance Progress Lab (wilierppl.com), one of several places that undertake such tests, explains: “Winter training is the time when most of us ‘get the miles in’. Some of us prefer a turbo while others brave the cold, but however you train over winter, we all share the same objective: the ambition of reaching the sunnier seasons in peak physical condition. “Using generic base training schedules can have varying degrees of success, but we are…

Eavesdrop in on a few conversations at a sportive and it won’t take long before talk turns to niggling aches and pains. Amid the excitement and pre-ride nerves are 101 excuses as to why training hasn’t gone to plan or how today’s time might not be a personal best. While some might be spurious claims made in a desperate attempt to save face, many will be genuine concerns and a few should really receive some much needed care and attention. Cyclists’ joints are made to work hard for long periods of time, and although they benefit from a lack of impact, the repetitive nature of pedalling a bike means any small issues with kit or bike setup can be magnified over time, causing pain, discomfort and eventually time off the…