One of the more common responses I get to the early phases of my programs is that they look too easy, especially for those riders who have some strength training experience under their belt. For a rider who has built up to doing 50+ push ups at a time (although I have yet to see 50 perfect push ups from anyone) only doing 5-20 reps seems like an insult to their pecs. Surely they should do more, right?
Not so fast…I am not impressed when someone tells me that they are not challenged by an “easy” exercise. In fact, when I hear this I know that true strength has eluded that person since strength consist of the ability to not only make heavy weights feel light but also the ability to make your light weights feel heavy.
You should be able to do 50 reps and be able to wear yourself out in 5 reps. When you can make 5 bodyweight reps feel like the hardest thing you’ve ever done then you truly have control of your ability to produce tension, which is the root of strength. If you are always relying on the load or the number of reps to tell you how strong to be then you don’t really own your strength.
This leads us to the Internal-External Intensity Continuum. This is something I made up one day while trying to explain this concept to a ride who trains at my facility. In a nutshell, explains where the “hard” is coming from during an exercise or workout.
If you are Internally producing the Intensity – like getting really tight and staying that way during bodyweight squats – then you are purposefully producing more tension than you need to in order to complete the movement. If you are Externally producing the Intensity – like doing a max effort lift or amount of reps – then the load is causing the body to reflexively produce tension in response to it.
You want every workout to be “hard”, you just don’t need or want to be going to the External side of the Intensity Continuum every time you train. Being able to benefit from the Internal side will round out your strength and support the other side of the spectrum.
This explains how you can have a “hard” workout without training balls-to-the-wall every time you hit the gym. When I tell riders that they should walk out of the gym during week 1 of a new program knowing that they could do more the old bodybuilding mindset starts to creep in – how can you get results if you don’t max out every time you train?
Notice, though, that I didn’t say that the workout should be easy; you should simply not max out how much weight and how many reps you can do. If you don’t have the ability to internally produce more tension than the weight or reps call for then this sounds ridiculous, however, for those who have learned the art of strength this makes total sense.
For example, during my current training phase I have a workout that calls for me to do 3 sets of 8 reps on the deadlift. I wanted to use week 1 to set up the next 2 weeks and so I didn’t want to go too heavy or I would not leave myself anywhere to go. So, I used conservative weights and built up to doing 185 pounds on the last set.
During week 2 I built up to 205 pounds and then in week 3 I hit 225 pounds for 8 reps, which was my max effort – I walked out knowing I couldn’t have done 1 more good rep. While a bit off topic, I’m going to finish the cycle with 3 sets of 5 reps with 205 pounds to back off a bit after my peak effort.
The point is that if you look at the weight progression (185 pounds to 225 pounds) my week 1 effort looks easy – its 40 pounds less than my max weight. However, I can tell you that week 1 was not easy (I was there). Week 1 was more on the Internal side of the Intensity Continuum, Week 2 was in the middle and Week 3 was on the External Side of it, making every week “hard” in its own way.
This concept also applies to training phases and plans. You have to spend some phases focusing more on the Internal Side and some on the External side of the Intensity Continuum. This is why the early phases in my workout programs confuse some riders – my programs advance from Internal Intensity focused phases to External Intensity focused phases and since they have never been told the value of working on the Internal side of the continuum it makes no sense.
Unfortunately, our training culture seems to have largely forgotten and dismissed the Internal side of the Intensity Continuum. Go heavy and hard or go home is the battle cry for thousands of well meaning riders limping their way to the gym or “boot camp”, never realizing that there is another side to the strength coin that is needed to complete and round out their strength.
So if you have an “easy” workout then take that as a chance to work on the Internal side of the Intensity Continuum, not as a chance to breeze through it and tell yourself how super fit you are. For a lot of people it will be very humbling to realize how little body and tension control they really have but with focused practice it will come pretty quickly.
Make sure that you have a balance of Internal and External Intensity focused exercises, workouts and phases in your overall program. True strength demands a balance between the two sides of the Intensity Continuum so make sure you respect and practice them both.
-James Wilson-
I have to admit that I was pretty surprised by Chris Carmichael’s book The Time-Crunched Cyclist. When someone told me about it and dropped it off for me to read I figured I’d glance through it but did not think it would hold much for me. After all, my battle cry for years has been to ditch the roadie influence and stake a claim to our own training identity.
However, as soon as I saw that the book was based on getting max results for those who had less than 8 hours a week to train I was intrigued. When I saw that the entire program was based on intervals I was floored. Here is one of the best endurance coaches in the world saying that if you have less than 8 hours a week to devote to training then you are literally wasting your time taking the traditional “base miles” approach.
In the book he explained that over the years he noticed that his standard approach to training, which obviously works very well, was not yielding the types of results he expected for some riders. When he went back and checked to see what they had in common he realized that lack of training time was the common theme. It seemed that something just did not work with the standard “aerobic base training” approach when training time dipped below 8 hours per week.
He also realized that there were a lot of riders who fell into that category. It was not because of a lack of dedication but more a reflection of the realities faced by people as they got older and their responsibilities increased. Pursuing a career, raising a family and maintaining a life outside of riding all siphoned time away from training and that was time that was simply not coming back.
So, he looked at ways to get the fastest gains in the least amount of time and based on the research concluded that intervals were the answer (I told you guys that I don’t just make this stuff up). In fact, he points out in the book that even highly trained cyclists will not benefit from more volume but need more intensity in their program to continue to progress.
While I won’t bore you with all the details he cites several studies that show that interval training produces similar gains in VO2Max, mitochondrial density and other markers of aerobic fitness as seen in aerobic base training type approaches. Plus, they increase power at lactate threshold and VO2Max, something aerobic training does not which gives you a powerful bang-for-your-buck result for your time investment.
Chris claims that the interval based programs can help you across the board, from local crits to 100 milers and even multi-day tours. Of course, he does qualify that you won’t get the exact same results as you would from a more traditional volume based approach but if you don’t have the time to follow that approach then intervals are the best way to go.
Here are some other random tidbits I picked up:
- The higher your cadence (more than 90 revolutions per minute) the more of a cardiovascular demand is placed on the body. The lower the cadence (70 – 85 revolutions per minute) the more strength you are applying into the pedals and the higher the muscular strength demand is. Since you can control your cadence on the road you can get away with maximizing the aerobic side but since trail riding doesn’t lend itself well to constant high cadences we need more muscular strength than roadies.
- Chris says that in order maximize your limited fitness levels you need to learn to pedal less. Pedaling takes energy and if you can pedal less you expend less energy, meaning that you have more when you need it. Chris used examples like staying near the front of the lead pack, limiting your “pulls” and other roadie specific stuff but I took it a different way.
Learning how to corner and how to “pump” terrain will help mountain bikers pedal less and conserve energy better. I see this all the time when I ride – I pedal far less than most riders yet I go just as fast thanks to getting my butt out of the seat and working the flow of the trail. I also have more energy to put into climbs and technical sections when the time comes. All of this adds up to me being able to hang on 4+ hour rides despite never training to do so.
- Interval training will lead to the best performance in rides or races lasting less than 3 hours. Last time I checked most XC races and all Super D, downhill, 4X and even MegaAvalanche races were less than 3 hours long. Even laps in 24 hour races are less than 3 hours when you are competing with a team. You have to get into the real extremes of mountain biking to get into events lasting longer than 3 hours.
I realized that the roadies are obsessed with riding for longer time periods than we are. They want to be able to ride a century and base their training around that goal. The vast majority of mountain biking doesn’t require 8 hours in the saddle and basing your training plan on the off chance that you will find yourself competing in the Leadville 100 is kind of crazy. If your average ride or race is less than 3 hours then you may actually be better off concentrating on intervals even if you had more than 8 hours a week to train.
- I do have to say that I was very disappointed in the “strength training” section of the book. He kind of talks out of both sides of his mouth on this one – his basic take is that the science is inconclusive and that a time crunched cyclist would be better off spending all of his training time on the bike.
However, he also said that he knows for sure that strength training will make you a more resilient athlete and that only sitting on a bike to train will lead to massive movement, mobility and strength imbalances. How you can acknowledge that and then say that you don’t need to strength train is beyond me. As I mentioned in a previous article, if you were saved from 1 or 2 major injuries and several minor ones thanks to strength training, wouldn’t you be fitter in the end than a cyclist who missed training time due to those injuries?
Also, there is no evidence that he understands 21st century strength training principles. For example, he recommends an exercise that encourages movement in the lumbar spine and says that it is good because those same muscles are responsible for resisting movement. The joint by joint approach to training tells us that if you want to train an area to resist movement you don’t accomplish it by teaching it to create movement, you do it by using exercises that teach it to resist movement.
All in all it was a very interesting read. Obviously Chris is not a strength coach, which is why I wish he would leave the strength training advice to the strength coaches, but the gist of the book was right in line with what I have been saying for years. If you don’t have the amount of time that pros do to devote to training then you can not follow a watered down version of their program. You need something totally different – an approach that relies more on intensity than volume to deliver results.
So, if you pick it up to read take it with a grain of salt. Remember that a roadie has a very different idea about what they want out of training, that road cycling has different cardio and strength needs than we do and that strength training is important for reasons that go beyond the surface level looked at by Chris.
However, the take home message is pretty simple – intervals are the future of cardio training for endurance sports. Their advantages are undeniable and the time investment is much more palatable for the average rider. You don’t have to have a giant “aerobic base” to be successful and trying to get one without the required time is a waste of time.
-James Wilson-
The Warrior Diet has been the subject of a lot of controversy in the fitness world. From the first time its creator Ori Hofmekler first started writing about it several years ago nutritional experts have been lining up to take shots at it and discourage people from trying it. It was, and still is, nutritional heresy.
What is it that makes it so controversial? In a nutshell, the Warrior Diet has you use controlled fasting during the day and controlled overfeeding at night. In other words, skip breakfast and eat little to nothing all day and then follow that up with a large meal at the end of the day.
This breaks every rule in the book – everyone knows that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you shouldn’t let yourself get hungry and eating a big meal before bed is a sure way to get fat. I sure believed the naysayers and steered clear of it.
However, over the last year or so I keep coming across smart people whom I respect who use or advocate the Warrior Diet. After reading more about it in the excellent training book The Purposeful Primitive I had to admit that my curiosity was piqued and I wanted to give it a go.
Several things about the diet make a lot of intuitive sense to me. I’ve never been hungry in the mornings and would gladly skip breakfast if I wasn’t told I needed it. I naturally don’t like to eat during the day, preferring to stay focused on my tasks and not have to stop every few hours to eat. I also prefer to eat a big meal at the end of the day and only skimp on it because I’m told it is bad for me. All in all, it seems like if I just ate the way I wanted to without external influences I’d follow something similar to the Warrior Diet.
So, I bought the book and spent a few weeks implementing it. In the book Ori makes a compelling argument for the need to fast during the day and how ancient warriors and hunters would subsist on a similar eating pattern. In fact, the term Intermittent Fasting is becoming more popular as more research identifies the benefits of controlled under-eating and the Warrior Diet is simply a type of Intermittent Fasting.
You are allowed to graze on things like fresh fruits and vegetables and eat some light protein sources like yogurt or kefir during the day if you get hungry but you can’t eat a meal until the 2-4 hour overfeeding period starts at the end of the day. As you do it longer you can eat less during the day and have a shorter overfeeding period but I stuck with grazing a bit during the day and letting from 5-9 pm be my overfeeding period.
While I was apprehensive at first I was surprised at how quickly I adapted to diet. I thought that hunger would be a huge issue but in reality it was not a big deal. If I got hungry I would eat half an apple, some carrots or some nuts and be good to go. My energy levels were pretty good and I actually enjoyed not having a post-lunch urge for a nap or having to think about how long I’d be gone and how much food I had to bring with me when I leave the house.
After a couple of weeks, though, I went through a period where I was training hard and riding almost every day. I found that I simply was not able to keep up with my energy demands and that I was crashing later in the day. About that time I read John Berardi’s excellent Special Report on Intermittent Fasting and learned a few more approaches to the concept, including fasting 1-2 days a week or following a 16 hour fast/ 8 hour feeding schedule. I didn’t want to have to go back to eating “normal” a few days a week and so I decided to try the 16-8 plan and simply shorten the fast.
I kept up my morning fast and started my eating period at lunch instead of dinner. I put my own twist on it by sticking with “live” foods from lunch until dinner and saving my processed “dead” foods for a small window around dinner. So far this plan has worked pretty well for me, although I will say that I would recommend planning your training for later in the day during your feeding period. If you do train or ride in the morning then eating a small to moderate protein smoothie with kefir/ Greek yogurt, fruit, whey protein and juice (avoid milk) beforehand will help keep you from crashing.
Overall my experience has been good and I now see an alternative eating strategy that lines up better with my normal rhythm. While the “eat every 2-3 hours” approach is very effective for those that can adhere to it, the truth is that a lot of people struggle to really take advantage of it. Intermittent Fasting and the Warrior Diet may offer another way to achieve nutritional success that would be worth looking into.
- James Wilson -
One thing that holds most riders back is the search for the “magic bullet” – that new bike or upgrade that is going to help them make a quantum leap forward in their riding. This is somewhat understandable since every where they turn they are bombarded with messages from the bike industry about how equipment is the answer to everything.
Want to climb faster? Get some fancy new clipless pedals.
Want to smooth out the ride? That new fork or rear shock will do the trick.
Want to ride farther with less effort? Bigger wheels will practically do it for you.
Want to ride like your favorite pro? You just have to buy the same bike they ride and you’re all set.
There is a huge difference between a good rider looking for a slight edge or a new challenge and an average rider trying to use equipment as the answer to all of their problems. In fact, this has been my biggest issue with the proliferation of 29ers – they are being billed as significantly better than regular wheels to prey on desperate riders looking for a way to significantly advance their riding. The truth is that wheel size is such a small part of the equation that it is laughable.
Don’t get me wrong – at the highest levels the small differences in shoes, suspension or wheel size do matter. However, like I detailed in my article on the 4 Quadrants of Training, 99.9% of riders are not at that level and instead need to worry about improving their skills and fitness, not their equipment. They are so far away from taxing the abilities of their current bike that getting a better one doesn’t really help as much as they think.
You end up spending a lot of hard earned money on a relatively small improvement and, what’s worse, that improvement is only available with that new equipment. You did not actually become a better rider, the equipment simply helped cover up more of your lack of fitness and skills. To me this is the easy way out and results in equipment dependent riders – take away their fancy shoes or big wheels and they are psychologically crushed and aren’t half the riders they are with “their bike”.
Another drawback to this mindset is the lack of sustainable progression from it. There is a ceiling to how much equipment can help and once reached then what? If equipment is your answer to improving as a rider you will stop improving pretty quickly. In fact, most riders I see on the trail have failed to improve much for years and ride the same trails the same way time and time again. After the initial improvements brought on by upgrading their equipment they fail to make any significant progress because they don’t realize that becoming a better rider is much more than buying new stuff.
Two of the best riders I have ever known would school our riding groups on bikes that most riders wouldn’t have thought possible to rip it up on. One guy I rode with when I lived on Kauai rode a piece of crap Iron Horse that was cobbled together with a mis-mash of parts and weighed 40 pounds or more. He would show up to ride in his old helmet held together by Duck Tape and leather work gloves and blow our minds with the stuff he rode, both up and down.
Another riding buddy from Texas rode a Specialized P3 hardtail and would win downhill races and XC races on it. He finally snapped the headtube off pioneering some big dirt jumps and had to upgrade to another bike but still kills it on whatever he throws a leg over. I ran into him at Winter Park last year and he let his buddy borrow his downhill bike so he ripped it up on his Yeti 4X slalom bike (which he used to race XC on as well), riding trails most riders wouldn’t touch with less than six inches of travel.
Most riders look at those two examples and say that they are just “natural riders” and while that may be true to a point, what makes them natural riders is a skill and fitness set, not some voo-doo black magic. The truth is that through training anyone can close that talent gap between them and natural riders and that this path results in sustainable progression that can be applied to any bike and any trail. However, this path is not easy and can’t be sold through slick marketing showing shiny bike parts and great riders ripping it up on bikes they are paid to ride and promote.
Does equipment matter? Of course it does. But if you find yourself trying to buy your next big step forward as a rider then just understand that you are not really improving as a rider. A good rider has the skills and fitness to ride anything and simply uses better equipment to help them dispay their talent, not as a magic bullet to make up for a lack desire to put in the work needed to improve the most important part of the equation – the rider, not the bike.
-James Wilson-
When working with people at my facility I always need to help them get over the “no pain, no gain” myth. Actually, I guess I should say that I need to help them understand it better. You see, muscular “pain” and discomfort are alright and needed – if you are not uncomfortable you are not pushing hard enough to elicit a change in the body.
However, joint pain is a totally different thing. Joint pain is a sign that your body is not moving correctly and is much like the “check engine soon” light has gone on in your car. You can ignore it for a while but a break down is going to eventually occur.
So, gutting through an exercise when your knee, low back or shoulder are talking to you is not the type of “no pain, no gain” you want. The vast majority of surgeries and rehabbing going on for mountain bikers are not acute, traumatic injuries like those that occur when you crash. Most of them followed a pattern similar to this:
Step 1: You notice a little pain in an area while you are riding or working out but it goes away after you get into your workout a bit.
Step 2: The pain doesn’t go away as fast and now it tends to linger for a while after training or riding, sometimes for a day or two afterwards. You can still work through it; it is just a bit more annoying now.
Step 3: You have to pop a few Advil before training or riding in order to keep the pain under control. Without some sort of pain reliever you just couldn’t train or ride are hard. You are also much more likely to need a day or two off after a long ride or hard workout to let the painful area recover.
Step 4: You are forced to go see your doctor after the pain relievers stop working as well and you can not get through a ride or workout with some serious consequences. Your doctor says that you have some sort of tendonitis or bursitis or some other “fill in the blank-itus”. You get some physical therapy prescribed and you do the work but it doesn’t seem to get a whole lot better.
Step 5: You are now scheduled for surgery. Maybe the pain just got so bad you couldn’t take it any more or a minor impact injury caused something to “break” but you now have some serious damage to a key joint that is going to impact you for the rest of your life.
This process may take years to get through but the sad part is that a lot of active people tend to go through this cycle a couple of times in their lifetime. Think about how many people you know that have had a knee “cleaned up” or a shoulder “tightened”. This speaks volumes about the poor level of understanding about preventing these injuries in the first place.
With rare exception, bad movement causes pain. In addition, where the pain shows up is usually not where the real problem is. Look at the joint above or below the area that is painful for dysfunction and you will find the real culprit. The low back is a great example of this – low back pain is not caused by a “weak” low back but instead from poor hip function and mobility. Ignoring the hips role in low back pain will never take care of the problem and will result in a lot of pain relieving drugs or, God forbid, surgery.
Going into the off season you have a golden opportunity to address the bad movement that causes you pain and holds you back. Don’t spend the next few months ignoring the pain and simply popping some pain relievers or just sitting on the couch to “let it rest”. Work on your mobility and core strength. Clean up your movement and get strong on that movement.
The secret to riding faster and longer each year is to address things when they are still in the Step 1 or Step 2 phase of the pain-injury-surgery cycle. You’re stuck with that body for a long time so take good care of it – you’ll be stoked when you’re 70 and can still be active and have fun!
-James Wilson-
Click Here to check out the interview I did with the Donegal MTB Club in Ireland.
I talk about everything from how I got started with MTB Strength Training Systems to my views on clipless pedals to pre and post ride nutrition .
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