Will Riding in a Group Make You Faster?

Logging miles solo has its advantages. Your on your own schedule, you can concentrate more on your effort and it's easier to do hard intervals. But is it really best to go it alone and ignore the thrill of competition? More importantly, will training alone make you just as fast as you'd be training with other cyclists?

With the trend for Tour de France contenders racing less and less, these are valid questions. Race-specific training and buildup has become almost as important as race fitness, which confuses the question of whether or not you can push yourself as hard solo as you can in a race or group ride.

Let's see if science has been able to come up with a sound answer.

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I Push You, You Push Me

The answer may seem obvious. Humans are competitive by nature. We've all experienced rides or races where we all shake our heads afterwards and say: "Man, s/he made me go so much harder than I thought I could!"

For over 100 years, sport psychologists have shown the effects competition on performance, such as raised stress and anxiety. And world records are usually broken in competition against athletes of similar elite talent. But surprisingly, almost no research has looked at whether head-to-head competition in cycling really does push you harder than you're able to solo.

One of the hottest topics in sports and exercise science over the past few years is the interconnection between the mind and body in controlling performance, and whether fatigue comes from physiology or from the brain trying to manage the body's stress.

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Martin Barwood, from the University of Portsmouth, has spent the past few years focusing on the effect of sport psychology interventions on physiological capacity. In the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, he looked at whether competition improved time trial (TT) performance and the physiological mechanisms behind it (Corbett et al. 2012).

So what did he find?

Corbett et al. 2012

The setup, as often the case with academic studies, was relatively simple: Have cyclists think they're competing against someone else on a Velotron (CompuTrainer) ergometer, when in fact they're actually racing against themselves and their best solo TT performance. Will they go faster or slower when going solo?

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1. Fourteen recreational athletes (although a potential weakness of the study not target recruiting trained or elite cyclists) were used in the study.

2. Subjects performed three familiarization sessions of the test protocol, consisting of a 2,000 meters TT on a Velotron ergometer with a flat course.

3. For all sessions, subjects were tasked with riding as fast as possible with no pacing strategy provided. While they could see their avatar on the virtual software, they received no performance feedback at all (time, wattage, HR, etc.) throughout the test. No verbal encouragement was provided.

4. The two test sessions involved completing the TT solo (essentially identical to the familiarization trials), or a head-to-head (HH) competition.

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5. For the HH, subjects were told that they would be competing head-to-head against another subject of similar ability in another room. Each cyclist could see both avatars and the distance remaining. In reality, the competitor on the screen was their own best performance during the three familiarization trials.

6. Oxygen uptake and respiratory exchange ratio (carbon dioxide production divided by oxygen uptake, a general measure of energy source) were measured. Data was mainly "binned" into 8 x 250-meter intervals to analyze pacing strategy.

Test Results

Not surprisingly, competition, even if it was against themselves, brought out the best performance. Here are the more detailed results:

1. The authors of the study reported that the three-familiarization trials were essentially identical in performance time, with a coefficient of variation (a measure of the variability between two repeated trials) of 1.1 and 0.8 percent between trials one and two, and between two and three. This would suggest that any difference in the solo versus HH wouldn't be from a learning effect.

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2. The TT times for the familiarization, solo and HH trials were 187.7 +/- 8.2, 188.3 +/- 9.5, and 184.6 +/- 6.2 seconds, respectively, with the HH trial significantly faster than the best familiarization or solo conditions.

3. During the HH trial, 12 out of 14 subjects were able to beat their competitors (best familiarization effort). The two "losers" lost by only 0.06 and 0.01 seconds, which was pretty close to a tie.

4. Blood lactate values at the end of the TT were similar amongst all trials.

5. Pacing strategy solo versus HH is difficult to compare due to the presence of a competitor. However, comparing the familiarization to HH, the tendency was that the first 1,000 meters were similar, but higher power output was maintained from 1,000 to 1,750 meters.

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6. With energy source, the aerobic contribution were similar, and it appeared that most of the difference was due to a higher anaerobic contribution in HH. This suggests that, when racing, you're better able to tap into a central physiological reserve because your brain is willing to let your body work harder.

Race to Train

One way of doing intervals is to replicate what was done in this study. Find a like-minded partner and do intervals together in a head-to-head setting, and put something on the line (e.g. who buys the coffee). If your abilities are dissimilar, you can have an over-under time cut and do a handicap race that way.

A team time trial, a smoothly rotating paceline, or a group ride where each rider takes a long steady pull are all good ways of incorporating group efforts on the road that'll provide solid training and minimal mental effort compared to doing it solo.

If you're actually in a race and using to train, have a clear plan for what you want to accomplish. Your goals can range from getting a long, hard ride in the pack, working on positioning or pre-planning an attack from the peloton.

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Remember, racing is going to be a much harder training stress than going solo. Make sure that you plan your recovery and your periodization around it properly.

Offseason Competition

I've been taking some of this competitive spirit to heart over this offseason. My buddy Rob and I, both about equal in ability as Masters racers, set up a training cave down in my basement complete with big-screen projectors and all sorts of high-tech toys.

We trained together every day, with the advantage that we keep each other accountable and motivated for indoor workouts. And even though our size and FTPs are different, there remains the subtle and not-so-subtle battle of "what wattage did you do that last interval at?" to push each other with.

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We've also been successfully sprinkling in virtual races in with Tour de Giro to give us that mental carrot of competition without having to think about intervals.

These are just a few ideas. Come up with something on your own to keep things interesting. With today's technology, you never have to train alone unless you want to.

Summary

Above all, even if you never intend to enter a competitive event, group rides can be great training and great fun, so join the peloton every once in awhile.

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