Ride Strong
Page 25
Quite simply, you should be doing all the riding you want during the peak of your season, taking in the goals that you have set and enjoying the best of the weather whenever you can.
If you have no injury problems and feel confident of your conditioning status, this is the time of year when some riders can afford to let their conditioning programme drop off altogether. If you want to make the most of your riding, you will want to borrow back that precious time you’ve spent on your conditioning and use it on longer days in the saddle.
With a structured plan the rest of the year, and with no injuries or issues, it’s possible to let your off-the-bike conditioning drop during the in season. However, most riders, and especially those with a history of injuries or issues, do better by maintaining some stretching or core maintenance exercises to enhance recovery and maintain postural alignment.
Typical seasonal schedule and adaptations
Remembering the success formula – personalizing your approach
The broad plan outlined above gives you an idea of what your conditioning programme could look like across the seasons. However, there is plenty of scope for personalization so that your essential conditioning programme meets your individual needs, particularly if the plan above is too comprehensive for you to get your head round.
Hopefully by working through this book, and in particular by trying some of the exercises in Chapters 2–4, you have some idea whether flexibility, strength or core needs to be your main priority, and where you sit along the success formula spectrum.
Ideally, your conditioning plan would include all three elements as you progress through the seasons as outlined above. However, for some riders an emphasis on two aspects may be more effective, particularly if you have no experience of consistent conditioning at all and are overwhelmed by the prospect of learning so many new exercises.
For example, if you start with a flexibility-focused programme you will hopefully progress to include some core elements in your schedule as you change from one season to the next. If you start with a core-focused plan, you may include some strength elements as your alignment improves and you feel ready to include some of the primal pattern movements. There is enough scope within the variety of exercises in this book to work in this way for as long as you want, changing the exercises you have chosen from each section as you move through the phases of your year.
Below I have outlined two alternative schedules for you to adopt if you recognize yourself in the following descriptions:
Alternative schedule A uses exercises from Chapters 2 and 4 only on stretching and core essentials
Adopt this schedule below if:
•you have a pattern of injury associated with muscle strains, joint sprains or lumbar disc problems
•you know that you are very stiff and have poor posture
•you have not done any consistent conditioning of any kind for several years.
Alternative schedule A
Alternative schedule B uses exercises from Chapters 3 and 4 only
Adopt alternative schedule B if:
•You have a history of injury associated with instability, subluxations and things ‘going out’
•You know that you are hypermobile
•You are a female rider
•You have not done any consistent conditioning of any kind for several years
Alternative schedule B
Reviewing your seasonal plan
Using the templates and guidelines outlined, now sketch out your own seasonal plan. You may have goals or aspects to your year that make your plan different from those I’ve used above so I’ve left the season parts for you to fill in yourself, in case your goal events are at a different time of year. The principles remain the same. Just shift the timing to peak in your ‘in season’.
Making a weekly plan
Once you have fleshed out your mesocycle view for the current season, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of what a week of training will look like for the next three months (your microcycle). The detail of your weekly plan will fall into place more easily when you have been through the process of your yearly and monthly plans first, and often it’s easier to focus day to day on what you want to get done when you have this perspective on where it fits into the whole.
As always, you should start with your riding schedule, and most people do better with a weekly pattern to their cycling training. Once you have sketched out the time you are spending on the bike, it makes sense to put into place any other time commitments that are regular and fixed, and make training impossible. You would probably include work hours, family time and any other regular commitments that rule out exercise.
One thing to bear in mind at this stage is that no one knows what will work best for you better than you. There really are as many ways to make your conditioning plan effective as there are people, but what you have to ensure is that you find a way to regularly put the time in.
Some people like to get up early to stretch and train before work. Others like to get to the gym at lunchtime to get a break from the office, and others still have the best chance of exercise in the evening when the kids have gone to bed. Some riders like to bolt their pre-stretching and core work on to their turbo training, stretching beforehand and working through the core exercise immediately afterwards. Some people like to do two or three longer sessions a week without having to do anything in between, while others like to do a bit of something every day. It really is up to you to choose your own adventure.
At this stage, jotting down some idea of when you will do some conditioning and roughly what type will be helpful.
Example weekly review
This schedule represents 12–13 hours of riding (including commutes), with three hours of conditioning (1 hour 40 minutes of stretching and 1 hour 20 minutes of core work). It has a stretching and core focus.
Example week
YOUR typical week of cycling, life and conditioning time
Where to place key cross-training activities
The example does not include any of the cross-training activities discussed in Chapter 5. A lunchtime swim or Pilates class would be a good addition to this programme if these options were appealing, and would allow my example cyclist to drop the longer stretching programme and perhaps one of the core programmes from the weekly schedule.
It’s important to plan any cross-training activities on a weekly basis to ensure that you progress with the activity as part of your broader programme. Making a commitment to a regular class or session is important, since if you miss it you may not meet your conditioning time quota.
Using time-based templates to design your own conditioning programme
For your weekly plan to be most effective, the time considerations are once again the starting point. This will make it most likely that you will stick to the plan, to ensure that you make the progress you deserve. I have included some conditioning templates here that slice your conditioning plan into 10, 20, 30 and 40-minute schedules to give you as much flexibility as possible in designing your own programme.
Ten minutes doesn’t seem very long, but in some instances breaking up the time you condition into these manageable chunks can make significant changes to the balance of your body. A conditioning programme with a strong emphasis on stretching, for example, can be built on frequent 10-minute pre-exercise stretching programmes (before every bike ride, for example, or daily in the morning), coupled with longer, more developmental stretching in the evenings before bed. Creating a more developmental stretch programme simply involves using the same stretches for longer and adding the ‘post-exercise only’ variations that you will see in Chapter 2.
Frequent short bouts of 10 minutes of ‘pre-stretching’ almost daily, coupled with longer, more developmental stretch sessions of 20–30 minutes two or three times a week, can be an effective way to become more flexible.
Core-focused programmes can largely be built on 20–30-minute sessions, and they may need to be made up of s
everal different variations that cover all the exercises that you want to include. If you are time squeezed during the week, you could look to include a longer programme at the weekend and then split it into two parts Monday to Friday (so that you manage two shorter sessions in the week), so that you get all the exercises in your programme twice a week.
Short core sessions of 20–30 minutes, including two or three exercises for three to four sets, can be an effective way to develop your core strength by including four or five sessions a week. In this instance you might design two mini-programmes that you alternate and if you have time for a longer session bolt them both together.
By changing the emphasis from stability (longer hold) and strength (8–12 rep range) exercises, as well as including different dimensions (sagittal, frontal or transverse plane focus) you will allow your body to adapt between sessions and develop your core stability and strength in three dimensions.
More comprehensive or strength-focused conditioning programmes that require multiple sets and six to eight strength and core exercises might need a full 40-minute session to maximize the benefits. In general, a 40-minute programme will be more effective when the emphasis is on strength and core exercises, because you can have days in between without any conditioning work to allow your muscles to adapt and respond to the movements. Additional elements could be supplemented too (such as pre-ride or post-ride stretching for 10 minutes at a time).
In general terms, the more to the right on the success formula you are working, the more effective longer programmes will be because they will allow enough time for multiple sets, and for recovery between sessions for your body to adapt to the more strength-focused training stimulus. These longer sessions with more of a strength focus will be more intense and time consuming, but would only need to be included in your schedule two or three times a week to be effective.
Based on these basic ideas, I have drawn up some example schedules for you to work with to sketch out your own programmes. Have a look over them now, and if you are ready, copy a few so that you can sketch out your ideas.
Using the conditioning templates
In the templates that follow, each box represents two minutes. Most of the exercises in this book can be completed in two minutes, allowing for the rest between sets. There are a few exceptions, notably the stability and postural core exercises, which may take four minutes per set to work through. List your chosen exercises in the left-hand column, leaving the extra rows (time) needed for completing multiple sets.
In working through the chapters of this book, and in consideration of your mesocycle emphasis (i.e. what the focus of your programme is at this time), choose 10–20 exercises in total that you want to include in your programme. Then separate them out into the divided (A and B, for example) programmes as you have chosen how to slice them up.
Any programme including all elements (stretch, strength and core) should be included in the order of pre-stretches, strength exercises and then core exercises. Any post-exercise stretches should be done at the end of the programme. If a programme includes only two elements, the order remains the same, the third element is just taken out. So strength and core exercises would be done in that order. Pre-stretching and core exercises will be performed in that order too.
If in practice when you work through the exercises it takes a bit less time than you expected, you can always add more exercises, but I’ve taken this approach to encourage you to design manageable programmes that you can do within the time allowed.
The essential conditioning templates
10-minute pre-stretching template
20-minute post-exercise stretching template
20-minute core-focused template
30-minute core-focused template
40-minute strength (and core) session template
References
Chek, P. (2004) How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! CHEK Institute.
Gracovetsky, S. (1988) The Spinal Engine. Springer-Verlag.
Magee, D. J. (2008) Orthopaedic Physical Assessment, 5th edition. Saunders.
Page, P., Frank, C. C. and Lardner, R. (2010) Assessment and Treatment of Muscle Imbalances: The Janda Approach. Human Kinetics.
Remember the success formula:
FLEXIBILITY + CORE STABILITY + STRENGTH = POWER POTENTIAL
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