- And what that's gonna do, is it's going to increase
the pace which feels fairly easy.
(electronic music)
Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.
Morning trainiacs, you ever have one of those swims
where you sleep in and you're like,
"You know what? I'm gonna outsmart the group here
"and I'm gonna get a good swim,
"I'm gonna come in towards the end,
"have a nice little mellow swim."
And then you start out, bam, no warm-up,
with 1,000 meters at race pace.
That was me today.
The swim outsmarted me.
1,100 meters overall, that's a taper swim.
Done, call it a day.
Pack it in, go home.
Kick your feet up, max and relax.
Somebody asked me in the comments earlier
this month about how to get better at cycling
and apparently yeah, I've been ignoring the cycling game.
So when I get back to the office,
we'll talk about overs and unders your race power
for how to get better at cycling.
Normally I just answer with
"Cycle more, mother (cymbal clash)."
That's a bad answer, I'm gonna give you some actual help
on how to cycle faster, cycle.
(electronic music)
Alright, before I get into
what you can do to improve your cycling,
this applies to people
whether you've got a power meter, a heart rate monitor,
gotta go, gotta go, gotta go,
or none of those things
and you're just going off of rate of perceived exertion.
I gotta get out of traffic here.
The basic premise is that you start
with figuring out approximately what your race pace
is going to be
and then you do workouts
that are slightly over that race pace
for shorter periods of time,
gradually building up to longer periods.
And then you do workouts for short periods of time
at over that race pace,
and then gradually build up those periods of time
longer and longer,
until you can hold a pace that is higher
than your previous race pace.
I can explain this so much better in the office.
I swear, one of these days, I'm gonna rehang that TV.
Cycling, cycling is one of the best aspects about triathlon
and the worst aspects about triathlon
in the sense that it's very, very easy, in a way,
to get faster at biking.
Basically, it's like a pure, one-to-one ratio,
well I don't know about one-to-one,
but it's like, very strongly positively correlated
that the more you bike, the faster you get.
That's not necessarily the case with swimming especially,
because it's so dependent on
do you have a history of swimming,
are you using the right technique.
It's less about overall fitness and time spent in the pool
and more about doing it properly.
Running is very much the same thing.
Running is very dependent on your natural ability.
You can run for ages and ages and ages and ages
and most people have a bit of a top end
of how fast they can run.
Cycling, however, you do it more, you get faster.
Straight up, that's all there is to it.
And it can be a lot of different types of cycling.
Mountain biking helps triathlon.
Commuting to work by bicycle helps triathlon.
Road cycling helps triathlon.
Long rides help triathlon.
Short, powerful rides helps triathlon.
Basically just time spent putting power into the pedals,
it all helps your cycling.
But if you wanna get the absolute best bang for your buck,
of cycling time in the saddle,
resulting in best times that you can put out in triathlon
and being faster and more comfortable in triathlon,
you gotta get a little bit more specific,
in addition to just that time in the saddle.
So how you start out is by figuring out your FTP.
If you don't have a power meter, that's okay.
Your FTP, your race pace, you figure it out
by doing basically a 20 minute max effort test.
You got a power meter, your FTP number
is 95% of the average power
that you've put out over the course of that 20 minutes.
If you don't have a power meter,
think about the average perceived exertion
that it feels like you've put out
over the course of that 20 minutes
and go just a little bit lower than that.
That's about your FTP number, or your FTP range,
or your FTP kind of perceived exertion.
Now, the race pace number is somewhere around 3/4 of that.
So that gives you a bit of a sense of
where your race pace is
when you actually get into a triathlon.
And what you can do, is you can use
that either perceived exertion or those power numbers
to start gradually increasing what your race pace is.
And there are two ways that you can do it.
Number one is by going at a pace that's lower
than that FTP number for longer than the 20 minutes.
So in my case, my FTP number towards winter,
January of last year, was around 257.
One of the workouts that I could do
to push that number up
is going around 200-220 watts
for longer than 20 minutes.
Now, in my opinion,
that's not necessarily gonna up your top-end speed,
it's gonna kind of build your engine,
it's gonna build the machine, the locomotive
that's gonna keep you going for a long period of time.
But if you really wanna bump up that power number,
and like I say, you can do that same workout
if you don't have a power meter,
just going off of perceived exertion,
going a little bit slower
than you think you would in a race,
but for longer periods of time.
And what that's gonna do, is it's going
to increase the pace which feels fairly easy.
Now let's see if I can find the middle.
So if this is your FTP number,
and there is your race pace, perceived exertion,
or watt number,
you're doing your training down here,
but for longer than 20 minutes.
And what that's going to do,
is it's going to raise the floor of what feels easy
and feels like a pace that you can sustain
for 20, 30, 40 minutes, an hour plus.
However, I think that a better way to approach it
is to take that FTP number
and do bursts at above that
and what that's going to do is raise your ceiling.
It's going to raise up the maximum amount of power
that you can sustain over the course of those 20 minutes,
which will then trickle down
to how fast you can go in a race.
So let's say, in my case, my FTP number is 257
and I can hold that for about 20 minutes.
Instead, what I do is go at 280s and 290s,
but for three or four minutes,
and then gradually increase that
to five or six minutes, up to seven or eight minutes,
all the way up to getting close
to a higher than my FTP number
for more than 20 minutes and then, bam.
You got a higher FTP number, which then trickles down
to having a higher race pace wattage number,
a higher race pace perceived exertion that you can hold,
you've just become faster.
And then to give you a little bit of perspective
on how long you should be doing
these low, steady-state, long, slow, distance intervals.
If you're banking on an Olympic distance race
and going for an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes,
you wanna be thinking that you're doing
those long, steady distances for two hours.
Like, you wanna hold it for a long period of time,
so that you're increasing the amount of time
that your heart and your legs
and your cardiovascular system
can plug away at
that chugga chug, chugga chug, chugga chug pace, make sense?
But then with these high, really hard intervals,
you can't do them for very long
because they're gonna rip apart your legs,
it's taxing the maximum amount of effort
that you can possibly put out.
So in my case, we were doing these
all over the course of last winter
and I would do, I think I started with
10 times two minutes at a hard effort,
and then it grew to 10 times five minutes at a hard effort,
and eventually it grew to 10 times seven minutes
at a hard effort.
No, that can't be right.
In total, I think it grew all the way
to doing a hard effort for maybe a total of 35 to 40 minutes
over the course of an hour and 20 minute workout.
And even though that hour and 20 minute workout
was so much shorter than the two and a half hours
I was gonna spend during a half-Ironman,
it actually raised my FTP numbers, my race pace,
by around 15% to 20%.
And it didn't feel that much harder.
So there you go trainiacs,
I have been ignoring, self-admittedly,
the cycling aspect of triathlon, which is wild because,
hey Mel, coming at ya soon,
wild because I am a huge fan of cycling
to improve your overall triathlon time.
It's like so much a big part of triathlon
that it's almost a bike race.
So get better at biking.
Alright, you ready to edit this?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét