Cycling at its peak

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If you follow a serious training regime, you've been training for months now and have built up your fitness to a high level. If you race, you are well into your racing season. If you ride in tours, you've probably done several and perhaps even a multi-day tour such as RAGBRAI(R). You ought to be feeling really good about your riding right now. If you feel tired of riding or burned out, read the next issue on recovery! Now that you've arrived at mid-season, there are some workouts you can do to hone your peak fitness for the season. I have a collection of workouts intended to work the anaerobic and VO2 max systems of your body. I enjoy this time of year because I can pull these workouts out of my collection and use them with the cyclists I coach. Before these can be done, you need to have a solid base of fitness which comes through a lot of endurance miles and aerobic threshold work. Once you've done these for a few months, you can take on more intense workouts. (Disclaimer: Be sure to be checked out by your doctor before attempting anaerobic type workouts!). Keep in mind, not every cyclist needs to or should do these intense workouts. It depends on your goals. If you are performance-minded or race, then you need to do these. If you are happy tooling along and just riding for the fun of it, then you really don't need to subject yourself to these workouts unless you want to.

I like to think of cycling fitness as a pyramid. At the broad base is the endurance and strength components of fitness. These should be worked on year-round and represent your fitness foundation. On top of that is your aerobic fitness. This fitness is developed by doing aerobic threshold workouts such as time trialing, which are hard but not anaerobic. These, too, can and should be done year-round. Then, and only then, can you work your way up to the pinnacle of the pyramid where you will find anaerobic and power workouts. These include intervals in the anaerobic zone where you will find yourself 'out of breath'. "Anaeobic" means 'without air' and that's what these intervals do - they force you to work in oxygen deficit which happens at very high intensities. These are the intervals that most people think about when you mention intervals - those gut-busting efforts that are very hard and hurt. I also include power intervals such as short hard accelerations and sprints. The nice thing about the pyramid image is that it does have a point at the top, representing peak fitness. You will only spend a short time at peak fitness. It is very difficult to maintain and even the pros can only hold their peak for a couple of weeks. It's possible to have 2-3 good peaks per season.

So what are anaerobic workouts and what do they accomplish? The best answer is that these workouts help every physiological aspect of your fitness. They stress both your aerobic and anaerobic systems. They cause your heart,lungs, blood and muscles to work at full capacity, something they don't get to do the rest of the year. By stressing these systems to their near-maximum, it forces them to get more efficient and thus increases your fitness level. Let's take your blood for example. The reason you get out of breath under high efforts is because you cannot supply oxygen from your lungs to your muscles fast enough. Training at anaerobic levels will force your body to make more red blood cells and increase its oxygen carrying capacity. Over time, your red blood cell and hemoglobin concentrations will increase.

You can only reach your peak fitness after a good, solid fitness base has been developed so your body can handle the additional stress. However, once you are able to do these workouts, you will find you are able to take your fitness to the next level and reach your peak performance!

For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.