Your body's ability to perform better than your rivals in three key areas when under pressure will make you a stronger cyclist than them. Don't be fooled into thinking it's too soon in winter to address these with some intense training right now.
Top Irish rider turned leading coach, Anthony Walsh, has used the experience he has gained racing at home and abroad to launch his A1 Coaching business for racers and leisure cyclists in recent years.
Walsh is now rolling out a 12-week tailored winter training programme, information and pricing on which can be accessed by following this link.
National road race champion and new An Post-Chainreaction rider Damien Shaw is joining former Irish pro rider Aaron Buggle to broadcast an online workshop next Tuesday, December 8th.
There is no charge and all are welcome. You can sign up for it by following this link.
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The event is brought to you by A1 Coaching’s new 12-week winter training programme in association with srickybottle.com.
By Anthony Walsh
Traditional training philosophies dictated that we should ride for endless hours in the winter in order to develop an aerobic base and improve our aerobic efficiency.
For those of us based in Ireland, this is particularly problematic – the time we are being asked to log the highest volume is a time when the weather is at its worst.
In recent years there has been a break from traditional practices, with more and more top riders and sports scientists advocating a reverse periodization structure.
This system turns conventional wisdom on its head – taxing the upper training zones early in the training cycle.
This is great news for us time-crunched athletes living in Ireland, who don’t like to ride endless kilometres on cold, dark evenings.
By focusing on physiological systems from the top down we can ‘pull’ each system up and elicit a greater training adaptation than the traditional bottom up structure.
A1 Coaching’s 12-week winter training plan is built around emerging research, which can have profound effects for working or full-time student athletes who need to get the most out of limited training time.
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No longer should our category be determined by available training hours.
Adherence to a top-down training structure can mean riders who train fewer hours are able to excel where previously they were passengers in races.
This training philosophy is a marked divergence from traditional ‘old school’ training principles. During the 12-week vase period, riders will work with a specific focus on developing:
Threshold Power
We can increase ‘threshold power’ by working just below threshold (pushing it up) or just above threshold (pulling it up). Over the course of the 12-week ‘base period’, we’ll use both strategies to increase your ability to clear lactate.
VO2 Max Power
Traditional logic wouldn’t encourage the implementation of V02 efforts until late in the ‘build-phase’. However, we’ll utilise efforts ranging from 1-5 minutes throughout the Build-Phase to increase weekly ‘training stress scores’.
Maximum Sprint
Regardless of our targets for next season, there exists a body of literature to back up the use of lactate base sprints during our base phase. A welcome bonus from 'training your sprint all year around' is that the next time you come to the line sprinting for prizes, you can be confident this is a skill you’ve practiced over and over again.
By taxing these systems early in our macro training cycle, we can take advantage of increased freshness to deliver maximum adaptations.
Aaron Buggle and Damien Shaw free webinar
National champion and new An Post-Chainreaction rider Damien Shaw is joining former Irish pro rider Aaron Buggle to broadcast an online workshop next Tuesday, December 8th.
There is no charge and all are welcome. You can sign up for it by following this link.
The event is brought to you in association with A1 Coaching’s new 12-week winter training programme and srickybottle.com.
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