DannoXYZ 

WINTER TRAINING: INDOOR RIDING & WEIGHT-LIFTING

I'm working up a winter weight-training programme for myself and figured I'd add some extra stuff for everyone else out there. Some people are stuck indoors due to weather, and the racing-season has ended, so changes in training are typical for recreational cyclists as well as racers. The types of workouts done is similar to the polar-opposites typically seen with on-bike training as well. On the road in one week, you may do all-out sprints as well as long-distance endurance rides. In the gym, we'll be doing both muscular strength-training as well as aerobic workouts. Due to the limited time one can spend in the gym or on a trainer/rollers, long endurance rides is NOT something that we can do in the winter, so plan your meals accordingly or else weight-gain will be inevitable.

WEIGHT-TRAINING
Why? To increase muscle-strength of course. If your muscles are aching at your max average-speed during a TT, if the limitation on hillclimbs for you are your muscles and how cramped up they get, or if you can't ride every day because sore muscles requires a day off every other day, then weight-training will be of benefit to you. However, if your HR maxes out in sprints or on hills out well before your muscles even feel it, then you'd better off working more on your aerobic capacity. The common misconception is that weight-lifting will end up making you gain 30lbs of muscle and look like AHhhnold. Well, there's actually a vast and wide range between the average cyclist and Mr. Olympia bodybuilders. Building strength to a point somewhere in between will improve performance for most cyclists.

The actual benefits you'll get will depend upon your fitness-level. Beginning riders in their first 5-years have the most to gain from strength-training. Top level cyclists at 90-95% of your genetic potential won't have as much to gain. Yet, weight-training is also an integral part of their training in order to rebuild muscle-tissue that's been consumed for energy during a long season of racing. Lance did 8-10 weeks of weight-training in the winters.

The idea with increasing strength is to improve efficiency, specifically aerobic and lactate-threshold factors. Typically, the lower efforts relative to their max that you make the muscles work, the more efficient they tend to be in terms of power-output vs. oxygen consumed. The higher the muscles are exerting close to 100% max-effort, the more inefficient they are. The LT-lactate threshold is the transition point where your muscles can operate aerobically at a pace you can hold for a long time, vs. going anaerobic and eventually stopping you from lactic-acid buildup. Muscle-fatigue on long rides is also related to how high you are pushing them compared to their max. So if you can increase your max-strength of your muscles, previous levels of exertion will be at a lower percentage and you'll be able to generate power more efficiently. The trick is to balance strength vs. weight-gain.

There's been plenty of research and papers written on this subject, so I won't say more; you can reference them here:

Edmund R. Burke, Ph.D. (USA national-team coach) - Strength Training for Cycling
NSCA - Resistance Training for Cyclists
PTS - Strength Training: Building a Bigger Engine
Ultra Cycling - Resistance Training for Endurance Cyclists
The Lance Armstrong Performance Program: Seven Weeks to the Perfect Ride, he recommends 4-6 weeks of weight-training.
Carmichael Training Systems - Lance Armstrong's Nov 99 Training Log
SpokePost - Training with Periodization (Part 3 of 8: Hypertrophy Phase)
RunnersWeb - Multisport: Strength and Power Training for Endurance Athletes
Journal Of Applied Physiology - Explosive-strength training improves 5-km running time by improving running economy and muscle power
Journal Of Applied Physiology - Potential for strength and endurance training to amplify endurance performance
Trinity Endurance/Fitness - Cross Training for Triathletes - Part 1
CoachesInfo - Maximum Strength & Strength Training - Relationship to Endurance? Review Part 2
Strength training for distance runners - summaries several studies showing weight-training improves endurance
Power Running - Resistance Training for Runners
Aphrodite - Strength Training Improves Aerobic Power In Seniors

Here's some other people who recommend strength/weight-training during the winter-months:
Greg Lemond - mutiple TDF winner, Greg Lemond's Complete Book of Bicycling
Lance Armstrong - multiple TDF winner, The Lance Armstrong Performance Program
Eddy Borysewicz - USA Olympic Coach 1980-1984
Edmund Burke, PhD. - USA Olympic Coach 1984-1988, 20-year Director OTC-U.Colorado, High-Tech Cycling, Serious Cycling
Chris Carmichael - 1984 Olympic Cycling team, USA Olympic Coach 1992-1996, The Lance Armstrong Performance Program
Chester Kyle PhD. - Chief Scientist OTC, 1984, 1997-1998 Olympic Team Aerodynamicist/Physiologist

TRAINERS
Indoor trainers vary widely in design and purpose. Most common are stationary trainers that clamp to your back wheel and gives you some resistance for riding. There are several kinds of resistance units, fans and magnetic/fluid. Fans simulate real-road riding the best and provides an exponential rise in resistance with speed (^2) which approximates real-world conditions the best; however, they are loud. Magnetic-resistance units provide a linear increase in resistance with speed (x2) and may not feel as realistic. They provide too much resistance at low-speeds, making you start out feeling like you're in too big of a gear, and as speeds rise, their increase in resistance doesn't go up as quickly as real-world wind-drag. So they feel too easy at high-speed compared to a fan-based resistance unit. Fluid-resistance units fall somewhere in between a fan and mag-unit. Rather than monitoring speed on a trainer, it's much more effective to monitor RPM, heartrate with a HRM and gauge workouts based upon heartrate, RPM and time.

Workouts with trainers are pretty much limited to aerobic workouts, forget about endurance unless you want to spend 2-4 hours sitting on a trainer like you would on an endurance ride. If you've got the mental fortitude for that, you may be able to do it. Otherwise, let's focus strictly on aerobic workouts.

1. steady-rate aerobics - this is a basic workout with 10-15 minutes of warm-up, then increase gearing and intensity to place your HR right at under LT and ride for 25-45 minutes, 60-minutes if you have willpower of a monk. Count on about a 300-500 cal/hr burn-rate.

2. aerobic intervals - simulates a hillclimb to work on the lungs. Pick a higher gear than normal so that you're in the 80-90rpm range for more resistance. Ride at a pace at your LT or slightly higher that you can barely hold for 15-20 minutes. Increase effort slightly in the last 2-3 minutes so that you max out your HR by the end, similar to blowing up at the top of a hill. Rest easy for 4-5 minutes and repeat another 15-20 minute effort

3. anaerobic intervals - simulates flat intervals on the road. You'll be aiming for 1-5 minute stretches at a steady speed above your LT with your HR increasing steadily to max-HR. Pick a gear that you'll spin at 90-110rpms at a speed that you cannot hold forever. Start with something that's 10-15% above your LT and hold that speed for as long as you can until HR maxes out. This may be similar to a 1-2 minute interval on the street. Rest easy for 3-4 minutes and repeat. An effort of 5-10% above LT may be held for a 3-4 minute interval. Record the gears you're using and resistance level so you can easily do intervals above your LT. Simplest intervals may be a set of 2-2-2-2-2 minute intervals, or you can mix and match to do a pyramid set of 1-2-3-4-3-2-1.

ROLLERS
Rollers are a completely different beast with minimal resistance. Using high gears does provide more resistance and stabilizing effect from inertia of the wheels and rollers along with rolling-resistance from the tyres and bearings. While you can do aerobic training on rollers, its main benefits are in a completely different arena: pedaling form and neuro-muscular connections. An analogy can be made with an Olympic javelin thrower. Riding trainers and doing weights is like him practicing his throw by tossing his javelin hard and building up strength. However, riding rollers is like him testing and trying out different javelins to find one that flies the fastest and farthest.

The main benefit of rollers is fine-tuning your pedaling motion to be more efficient. Again, like with weight-training, those starting out has the most to gain. New riders tend to push only through a narrow 120-degree range of the crank's rotation using mainly the quads and glutes. There's a limit to how much power you can generate once you hit 100% muscle-effort, and muscles operating at 100% is not very efficient and are anaerobic. However, by adding more force to the other 240-degrees using the other 8 muscles that have been ignored, you can actually generate 3x the power at the same muscle-strength by spinning smoothly. Or another way to look at it is, at the previous power-levels, you can do that with just 1/3rd the muscle effort. They will be operating much more efficiently and require lower amounts of oxygen for the same power output. Part of this increased power is using the force that's normally required to push up other leg through the dead-spot to drive the bike forwards instead.

However, you can't just hop on rollers and ride. There needs to be a conscious mental strategy with modifying the sequence of muscle contractions to yield the smoothest pedal stroke. Learning which muscles needs to be recruited and learning the new motions can first be picked up with one-legged riding on the street. Use an easy gear like 38x17t so you can ride slowly. Get up to medium speed in that gear and pull one leg out (hold it to the side to clear the pedal; I like to rest it on top of the chainstay by the rear-derailleur). The dead spots will be quite obvious. Intentionally focus on the muscles that needs to be used to move the crank through the dead spots. Doesn't require more than 10-20 seconds of riding one-legged to learn the new motion. This new neuro-muscular connection is what you want to focus on when you ride the rollers. Repeating that motion over and over again actually makes new nerve connections and is eventually imprinted in the cerebellum where automatic motions are triggered.

Workouts on rollers can be similar to trainers with steady-state, aerobic and anaerobic intervals. Another good exercise is to start out in medium gears, get smooth and gradually shift into lower and lower gears. As the speeds slow down, try to maintain same RPM. The lower inertia will make everything feel more wobbly, so the practice maintaining balance and smooth pedaling motion. You can extend this even further by continuing the downshifting until you get into your lowest gear. Once you're smooth here, gradually increase the RPMs while maintaining smoothness; if you start bouncing, slow down a bit and get smooth again.

More advanced roller workouts can involve riding out of the saddle and doing high-RPM sprints. I won't mention anything about that here since anyone who's going to be doing this already knows what to do.


Combining Weight-Training w/Trainer workouts
Simple way to combine both aerobic trainer and weight workouts is to alternate the intensity. This can be done between different days of the week, like hard weight-workouts one day and easy trainer workouts the next. Then easy weight-training followed by hard trainer sessions. Or you can even do it on the same day at the gym. When you're doing hard weights, go easy on the bike and vice-versa. It's usually a good idea to warm up on the trainer before doing weights. You can also do an interval set or two while you're waiting for a weight-station to open up. At the very end, you can do a long aerobic session on the trainer to cool down.