Cycling Science: The Art in Keeping it Simple

Part of the fun in being a sport scientist is the opportunity to dig into the minutiae of scientific training. Much like the joy most people have thinking through every bike component or upgrade purchase to squeeze in the slightest advantage over opponents, scientific training has a lot of details to decipher through to get the most out of your body and your gear.

However, you can also overthink yourself, and sometimes it's best to just go with the basics and trust your judgment.

Here's four tips to keep the science in your training simple.

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Don't Overthink Your Training

Being an exercise scientist and having written a book titled "Cutting-Edge Cycling," I'm obviously an advocate of smart and focused training and using the latest scientific tools. But it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I'm an advocate of science, as long as it has a stopping point.

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Much as scientists may hate to admit it, training is as much art as it is science. What works for one cyclist may be the absolute antithesis of what another cyclists needs or wants. Every cyclist brings a unique set of physiology and capacity to respond to training load, not to mention mental makeup. There are just so many variables that it's impossible to prescribe a standard template of training that will work for everyone.

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With that being said, there are tried and true principles that we can all follow and mold to fit our own personal agenda's. If you look at almost any cycling discipline, there are really three fundamental requirements for success in my opinion, which I've listed below.

1. Aerobic fitness
2. Event specific fitness
3. Event specific technical ability

Plan your training around those three principles, and you can't steer too far off course. For myself, my big goal in 2012 was coming back to Ontario and upgrading from Masters 3 to Masters 2 in cyclocross, a goal that has eluded me the three prior seasons. Keeping my personal goal in mind helped to develop a better plan as it relates to those three stages of my training.

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The Importance of Aerobic Base

Regardless of your goals or cycling discipline, the sport requires and rewards a big aerobic capacity and as high a functional threshold power as you can achieve. In that sense, it really isn't rocket science. Whether you're a pursuit rider on the track, a criterium specialist, a cyclocross fanatic, or simply aiming to complete a century or Gran Fondo, the "heart" of the sport is maximizing your cardiovascular, metabolic, and neuromuscular efficiency. Even a kilometer rider on the track is predominantly stressing their aerobic metabolism for energy.

So without an aerobic base, you just won't get your race fitness as high as you could, and your peak fitness won't last as long either. So focus on that as much as you can. Of course, how much aerobic fitness and endurance you need depends on the nature of your sport, and that's where individualization and specificity comes into play.

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For me, what really hit home was my brief chat in Brussels last year with two-time World Cyclocross Champion and all-around nice guy Bart Wellens, was the time he spent during the summer building aerobic fitness and racing smaller Belgian races with his Telnet-Fidea squad. He didn't do any cyclocross training until August and September, where he went to cyclocross specific workouts.

So if it worked for Bart, who am I to argue? I thus spent May through July in the Netherlands bashing my head against the relentless wind, doing a variety of 10- to 20-minute threshold building intervals. I didn't touch a bit of anaerobic work for that whole time, with my only goal of raising my FTP as high as I could get it. Through the Pez party and other fun rides with friends, I also did long days in the saddle (five hours or more) to build sustained endurance.

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How did that work out? After arriving in Netherlands, I was doing 10-minute efforts averaging 215 Watts. Week after week, that average kept going upwards, which only helped to increase motivation to stay the course. Returning from the Pez 10th anniversary bash in Italy in early June, the 10-minute average went up to 235 Watts. By the end of July, I was regularly able to do 4 sets of 10 minutes at 275 Watts.

Lesson #1: There really are no shortcuts to fitness. It takes time and consistency, but the results can be quite dramatic. What I can't promise is a World Championship.

More: Aerobic Gains: Sprint vs Endurance Training

Event Specific Fitness

Once your aerobic capacity is as high as you can reasonably get it based on your planning and time availability, the next step is to convert that towards event-specific fitness. This is often the "Build" phase of many programs. The primary purpose of this phase is to focus on high-intensity workouts that replicate the efforts required in your desired events.

So individualization and specificity here is critical. What works for a cyclocross rider is going to be completely different from that of a criterium racer. Even though both events are often similar in duration and feature a lot of accelerations, a cyclocross rider is doing it at low speeds and in low cadences, while a criterium rider is accelerating from a very high cadence. Each will therefore benefit from different kinds of high-intensity workouts.

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For my focus on cyclocross, the keys to the sport are both really high power outputs from low cadences, but also these bursts are really short and with short periods of recovery.

My plan for August then was to transition from aerobic work to high-intensity. Rather than jump into very short 10 to 15 second intervals right away, I went with the philosophy of maximizing my anaerobic power by spending two weeks doing 3 to 4 workouts per week of 6 to 8 absolute maximal 1 min efforts from a standing start with lots of recovery in between.

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After that, I then introduced the incomplete recovery inherent in cyclocross, and indeed in most racing. Taking a cue from the sadists at The Sufferfest, I did road versions of two of their videos, the "Downward Spiral" (120-105-90-75-60-45-30-15 s all-out with equal recovery) and "Revolver" (15 intervals of 1 min all-out with 1 min recovery). Besides leaving my lungs on the road, these three simple workouts prepared me well for the final phase of training, that of event-specific technique.

Lesson #2: Match your high-intensity work to your cycling goals.

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Event-Specific Technical Ability

The final step, one that can run throughout the year, is technical mastery of your discipline. That may involve lots of trail riding for mountain bikers, fast and large group rides and drills for road riders, high-cadence spinning for track riders, etc. This really cannot be neglected, or else all that fitness you've built up is going to be frittered away because of things like not being in the right position in the peloton, or of course crashing out of a race! For a cross rider, technique is really huge, as that extra second lost coming out of each corner adds up to a ton of extra work.

Summary

There are a thousand ways and more to dissect and plan training, but what I've laid out here I believe to be the fundamentals of any training plan for any cyclist. Therefore, while the devil may be in the details, don't lose sight of the big picture and the three main boxes that you need to tick in order to achieve your goals.

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