Rest and Recovery Rides

Rest and Recovery is the secret to getting faster.  I see so many riders stagnate in their training because they fail to rest or recover properly from their workouts.  So what does a proper recovery look like?  There are many good examples of excellent recovery rides.  But generally speaking you want something that doesn't deplete your muscle glycogen stores while applying just enough stress to your aerobic system.

Here you can see a typical recovery ride, one that could follow a 100-160km ride, or 3-5 hours saddle time at medium to high intensity.  This ride was completed a day after an intense 5hr ride, and is 1hr30min in length.

The target wattage, in red, should be in zone 2.  I'll define the watts for zone 2 to be between 55 and 75% of your Critical Power at 60minutes.  For the majority of the time you will stay in this range.

While also staying within zone 2 for heart rate (dark blue).  Heart rate zones are similar to Power Zones.  I'll use the word "Threshold" to mean your average heart rate during the last 30 minutes of a 60 minute all out effort.  HR Zone 2 is between  65 and 82% of Threshold.

In the graph, HR zones don't show up, the wattage Z2 is shown in the purple.  You can see that this ride was in the middle to high end of the wattage zone 2.  Power was slowly increased through the ride to illicit a heart rate response.  Around 1hr10min a combination of cardiac drift and an increase in power caused too much of an increase in heart rate.  Thus you see that power was reduced slowly, allowing heart rate to go back into zone 2.  Toward the end of the ride a small increase in effort caused heart rate to skyrocket up, implying the ride should be ending soon.

Analysis such as these take skill, attention to detail and full grasps of the concepts.  You too can get this kind of level of detail in a recovery ride, using my coaching services.  I outline the zones to each of my athletes and teach them how best approach the training regimen I have planned for them.

*Note to self: make a post about cause and affect of cardiac drift.

Planning a Training Ride Using Your Power Meter Data

When it comes to the money thrown down in the sport of cycling, a power meter is the number one thing I recommend.  In terms of helping you to ride faster and longer there is no better tool.  If you are serious about competing at a high level, you can go a long way on your own with a power meter.  Even further with my help :)

Today I will focus on one concept to help you analyze a training file, let's take an example of this ride file from July 24th, 2013 and the energy output.

Energy Consumption for that ride was a total of 2695 kJ (kilo Joules).  The kJ is the amount of mechanical work that was completed.  We can then convert this mechanical work to the amount of food energy that we would need to consume in order to complete this activity.  Which corresponds to 644 Calories, note big C not little c.  Calculations and information about the conversions can be found here.

What this means is that during the 4hrs of ride time, I would need to replace about 160 Calories per hour, you can see further explanation using a similar but different approach from Chris Carmicheal of Carmicheal Training Systems.  Both methods yield nearly identical results.

Because of my familiarity and knowledge using power, I can predict with certain accuracy what nutritional requirements I will need for the days' training.  Anticipating about 200w average for 4 hours, I knew it would be about 3000kJ and 720Cal day.  So I brought roughly 180gm of carbs,  1gm of carbs = 4 Calories, 4*180=720Cal.  With the average temp of 35C or 95F, fluid intake would also be important, which means about 1.5L per hour, 8 bottles and 6L of water.  One bottle at double concentration 60gm carbs, and 4 bottles at 30gm each were mixed and loaded.  When the 4 bottles run out, I stop and refill, splitting the double concentration into two and the rest with water.  Normally I bring a protein snack on rides like this but ended up leaving it behind.  Not the best move but not terrible either.  On rides such as this and over 3 hours I like to chew on something.

A Beginners Guide to Golden Cheetah - Ride Data Analyzing Software

GoldenCheetah - 100% Free and Opensource, developed for Linux, Mac and Windows.  It is also very easy to customize.  There are many components, some you will use and other you will not.  This is designed to help you review your ride data.  For good reflection on past workouts and performance, I recommend at minimum you are collecting at least four metrics if you don't have a power meter.  For example: heart rate, speed, cadence and distance would help you to compare data from workout to workout.

Download GoldenCheetah Here

Once that is installed, you can follow along with my setup video tutorial, on you tube, just follow the link below.

Golden Cheetah First Time Set Up