Written by: Josh Horowitz (LiquidCycling.com)

Part I
Have you heard the saying in cycling that any training program, even a bad one is better than no program at all? Sounds crazy, but it’s true to some extent. There is no better recipe for at worst over training and at best hitting a long flat plateau than going out every day without a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish and where you are in the big picture of your training cycle. Just by breaking the year down into a few basic cycles, you can at least improve the chances that you will be riding strong at the right time and that you will continue to improve from season to season.

Writing a program is actually fairly easy, (but that’s a topic for another article). As a coach, writing the actual training program is only the very beginning of helping a cyclist reach their goals. So let’s say you’ve got a coach or you are your own coach. You’ve laid out the training program for the year, the time, the distances, the zones, the intervals. You’re set right? Not yet. In fact, this is only the start. Training is an art form that goes well beyond numbers written on a piece of paper and the skills and understanding of how to do it properly. Just like cycling itself, it requires a lifetime of experience to prefect.

It seems pretty self-explanatory. Ride for X amount of time at heart rate Y and at cadence Z, and you get stronger, no worries. However, to get the most out of your workout, it’s actually a little more complex than that and when you start to get into intervals, things really get complicated. When I was first starting off as a racer, my coach happened to see me doing some one minute efforts on a ride. Later that night, I got a tentative phone call. “Uh… Bloke, not sure how to say this, but you’re doing it all wrong.”

How could I be screwing up a one minute interval?? You pedal as hard as you can, count off 60 seconds and stop! Imagine 2 years of training and suddenly you find out it’s all been a complete waste. Well, not exactly a waste, but the point is, there was a better, more economical way to be doing it and the sport of cycling is all about efficiency. Efficiency in equipment, efficiency in position, efficiency in strategy and in this example, efficiency in training, which can only be achieved through years of experience and a highly developed understanding of how your own body works.

With the rising popularity of power meters, it has become increasingly easier to perform and to monitor highly effective workouts. However, before you go run out and buy one, it is important to understand exactly what information they tell you and what to do with it. In fact, I actually dissuade some of my newer clients from buying a power meter because I still feel they have things to learn about their body and their training that could possibly be harmed by starting to train with power too early.

I always tell my clients to train with, “The Concept of Power”. Many cyclists get into the rut of thinking that the goal of any interval is to get your heart rate up. Riders become so attached to their heart rate “zones” that it becomes the all encompassing end all be all of riding. In racing, the goal is never to get your heart rate up, (in fact, the goal is to keep it low), so when that becomes the objective in training, it creates a confusing contradiction. Training with The Concept of Power means that increasing speed, efficiency and power in training always take precedent over heart rate. Realizing this is the first step to getting the most out of your limited time on the bike.

In the next article, we’ll talk about how achieving a greater understanding of how your own heart works and what your heart rate monitor can and can’t tell you can be used to improve the efficiency of your training.

Part II
Every Heart is Different

In the last article, I wrote about how relying solely on heart rate, can often lead to and even encourage improper and inefficient workouts. Therefore before any of my clients delve into the world of measuring watts, I encourage them to first, take the time to learn about and understand the limitations of heart rate data and to understand the uniqueness and idiosyncrasies of the human heart so that when the do incorporate wattage into the equation they will have an even better understanding of how their own body responds to and recovers from racing and training.

One of the most common complaints I hear from new riders is ‘my heart rate is too high’ or ‘too low.’ There is no such thing. I coach two racers in their mid 30’s. I have a standard monthly 5 mile road test (hill climb) which they both complete in about 19 minutes. The only difference? One rider does it at 155 bpm and the other at 205. Same age, similar power output, similar weight, 50 beat difference in heart rate. There’s nothing wrong with either of them, they’re just different.

By this point, most of us know that heart rate is subjective. It’s the whole reason we need power meters which are completely objective. Heart Rate is affected by weather, mood, sleep, caffeine and perhaps most importantly, exhaustion from previous workouts and other stresses placed on the body and mind. However, this does not mean that heart rate can’t tell us a lot about what is going on with our bodies, information that we can incorporate into our day to day training. In fact, the very fact that heart rate is so easily affected by these different factors is what makes it such a useful training tool. But every heart is different and it is essential that each individual rider understands how their own heart works and… what makes it tick.

Heart Rate is Subjective.

I have several riders (including myself) whose heart rate at a given effort will drop by as much as 20 beats over the course of a 4 week training cycle. On week 4 of a cycle, I’m doing the same amount of work both in watts and in perceived exertion as in week 1, but my body is tired and my heart rate just won’t go up to where it was when I was fresh. After a recovery week, my heart rate will go back up to where it was before and the process starts again. To make things even more complicated, I have another rider whose heart rate goes UP 5 to 10 beats over the course of a hard training cycle! This is less common, but it does happen and you should know which kind of rider you are.

Tracking your resting heart rate is one of the easiest and most important (but possibly most neglected training tools) the cyclist has to monitor their level of exhaustion. Simply take it each morning before you get up out of bed. Once again, don’t put too much emphasis on the number itself. Just because your training partner has a resting heart rate of 35 and yours is 55 does not mean he’s in better shape than you. What is important, is to watch the flow of the numbers and look at the big picture rather than any individual day.

The general guideline is that a 10% increase in resting heart rate indicates that the body is not recovered from the previous day’s workout. However when you keep your training log make sure to note other factors that could be affecting your resting heart rate. The stress of waking up at 5 am to a day where you will try to squeeze in a 2 hour training ride so you can make an 8 am meeting and then work through lunch so you can pick up the kids from school at 3, come home, grab a snack and then head out to a night at your in-laws could easily be responsible for a 10% increase in resting heart rate and doesn’t necessarily mean you should skip those hill repeats.

Putting it all Together

The point is that people’s hearts are vastly different in the way they respond to training and there is no simple formula that can be used across the board for everyone. By interpreting the messages your body is sending you, you can learn to tell when you are over trained and when you are simply over-reaching, or placing a necessary level of exhaustion on the body to create the training effect. By keeping a training journal with not only the heart rate from your workouts and your resting heart rate, but also notations on how you feel and how much distance you cover in your intervals (or wattage if you already have the power meter), you can start to figure out how long it takes you to recover from a workout. I would also recommend noting sleep patterns, daily stress, and dietary intake so you can start to understand how these things affect your heart rate and your performance.

Before you even start to look at Watts, you should be able to look at your training schedule and predict how your heart rate and your workouts will be affected by the level of stress that your body is attempting to adapt to. You should know inherently that on week 3 of a cycle of zone 5 intervals, it may take 2 minutes for your heart rate to actually get into the zone that you are reaching for or that it might not even get into mid zone 4. But by knowing your body, you will be able to tell whether this is an indication of over training or whether it is just the natural progression of periodized training. This same understanding can be used to explain why your heart rate during endurance training is lower at certain points of the season and in fact can be applied across the board to all your training.

So why not just run out and buy a power meter and avoid all this confusion and uncertainty? It is my belief as a coach that part of the training life of a cyclist must be spent making mistakes and learning from them. The hardest riders to coach are the ones who make the same mistakes over and over again. They never learn anything new about themselves and therefore never progress to the next level as athletes. Buying a power meter before this process of self discovery has been completed is like combining your base training with your build period. It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, even heart rate at first can be a deterrent to this process. When you come to rely on any device or test to tell you how you are feeling, you start to lose just a little bit of that natural mind-body connection that a good athlete must learn to understand.

When the battery dies in their heart rate monitor and the rain short circuits their power meter, the best athletes can go out and do their training without missing a beat because they know their bodies. By looking within themselves, they can collect and record more data than even the most complex mechanical apparatus.

In part III we’ll discuss how to start incorporating power into your workouts even if you don’t own a power meter.

For coaching and training services you can Josh Horowitz at
www.liquidcycling.com

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